Travel and Horizons

The deep Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows, for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

 

Much have I seen and known; cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments, Myself not least, but honor’d of them all; And drunk delight of battle with my peers, Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravel’d world.

 

Make voyages!—Attempt them! —there’s nothing else.

Passage to India.

’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Perchance, coming generations will not abide the dissolution of the globe, but, availing themselves of future inventions in aerial locomotion, and the navigation of space, theentire race may migrate from the earth, tosettle some vacant and more western planet. . . . It took but little art, a simple applicationof natural laws, a canoe, a paddle, and a sail ofmatting, to people the isles of the Pacific, anda little more will people the shining isles ofspace.

Eliza made her desperate retreat across the river just in the dusk of twilight. The gray mist ofevening, rising slowly from the river, enveloped her as she disappeared up the bank, and theswollen current and floundering masses of icepresented a hopeless barrier between her andher pursuer.

America is my country and Paris is my hometown.

Even in Paris, I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish, but I didn’t inhale.

As the traveller who has been once from home is wiser than he who has never left his own door step, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinise more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

As an artist, a man has no home in Europe save in Paris.

I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience—a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.

Life is a great adventure, or it is nothing.

The rule for traveling abroad is to take our common sense with us, and leave our prejudices behind.

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

What is traveling? Changing your place? By no means! Traveling is changing your opinions and your prejudices.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

The writer is an explorer. Every step is an advance into a new land.

after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us.

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.

To lose your prejudices you must travel.

The library is an arena of possibility, opening both a window into the soul and a door onto the world.