14 Travel-Inspiring Quotes from Literature

Here are some lesser known observations from a few of my favourite writers that are primed to get the mind racing towards the road. In a step away from the usual, more linear Twainesque travel quotes that we often encounter, I hope that these buried gems burn longer in your imagination. Saluting your journeys readers! Be bold and enjoy...

1. Franz Kafka

'There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction. One has to go abroad in order to find the home one has lost'

2. Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf

'I dropped all my defences and was afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart'

3. Nicolas Bouvier - The Way of the World

'Dodo had lived everywhere for a while, left many jobs just as they become profitable, had learnt a lot and doubtless read a lot. He rarely talked about it all' ... 'He was completely at ease in his frugal, nomadic life. His soul remained scoured by his trials, his spirit remained fresh and ready for anything. Sometimes there was a mild nostalgia for white wine and walnuts and camembert... but no desire to go home or to settle down'

4. Jean Genet - The Thief's Journal

'When at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life'

5. Blaise Cendrars - To the End of the World

'Action is the only thing that makes us free, and our ideas are nothing but action aborted'

6. Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf

'You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must perish. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easy-going and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours'

7. Nicolas Bouvier - The Way of the World

'Loafing around in a new world is the most absorbing occupation' ... 'Taking your time was the best way not to lose it'

8. Friedrich Nietzsche - The Gay Science

'For believe me: the secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is - to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!'

9. W. Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence

'To these people, native and European, he was a queer fish, but they were used to queer fish, and they took him for granted; the world was full of odd persons, who did odd things; and perhaps they know that a man is not what he wants to be, but what he must be. In England and France he was the square peg in the round hole, but here the holes were any sort of shape, and no sort of peg was quite amiss'

10. Jean Genet - The Thief's Journal

'Solitude is not given to me; I earn it. I am led to it by a concern for beauty. I want to define myself in it, delimit my contours, emerge from confusion, set myself in order'

11. Jean-Paul Sartre

'Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you' ... 'It's only in our decisions that we are important'

12. Italo Calvino - Baron in the Trees

'What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did'

13. Henry David Thoreau - Journal

'We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success'

14. W. Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence

'I think the moment he reached Tahiti he felt himself at home. Tiare told me that he said to her once: 'I'd been scrubbing the deck , and all at once a chap said to me: "Why, there it is." And I looked up and I saw the outline of the island. I knew right away that there was the place I'd been looking for all my life' ... 'Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Here is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest'