Travel Quotes and Country Facts

Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”

“Once you have travelled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving (Lao Tzu)

A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you've been taking (Earl Wilson)

It is far easier to travel than to write about it (David Livingstone)

It is not down in any map; true places never are (Herman Melville)

Laughter is an instant vacation (Milton Berle)

Let your memory be your travel bag (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

Life is short and the world is wide (Simon Raven)

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen
(Benjamin Disraeli)

Long voyages, great lies (Italian proverb)

Love to travel, but do not make the road your home

Man plans ... God laughs (Old Hebrew saying)

No man needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one (Elbert Hubbard)

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on
his old, familiar pillow (Lin Yutang)

On a long journey even a straw weighs heavy (Spanish proverb)

People don't take trips ... trips take people (John Steinbeck)

One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things (Henry Miller)

My home is where my furniture is (Anonymous expatriate)

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home (Dagobert D. Runes)

Remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination (Roy M. Goodman)

So much of who we are is where we have been (William Langewiesche)

Somewhere on your journey, don't forget to turn around and enjoy the view

Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey (Babs Hoffman)

The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists (Sam Ewing)

The beginning is always a good place to start

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched.
They must be felt with the heart (Helen Keller)

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it (Rudyard Kipling)

The happiest asks directions, even though he knows the way

The journey not the arrival matters (T.S. Eliot)

The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait till
that other is ready (Henry David Thoreau)

The only way of catching a train I ever discovered is to miss the train before (G.K. Chesterton)

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes (Marcel Proust)

The rewards of the journey far outweigh the risk of leaving the harbor (Unknown)

The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack (George Ade)

The traveler sees what he sees.
The tourist sees what he has come to see (G.K.Chesterton)

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time (Colette)

The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist (Russell Baker)

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Those that say you can't take it with you never saw a car packed for a vacation trip (Unknown)

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries (Aldous Huxley)

Travel broadens the mind and raises the spirits

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect (Paul Theroux)

Travellers never think that they are the foreigners (Mason Cooley)

Travelling is dancing lessons from God (Kurt Vonnegut)

Travelling tends to magnify all human emotions (Peter Hoeg)

Treat the earth well. It was not given to you by your parents, it was loand to you by your children (Kenyan proverb)

Trust in Allah, but tie your camel (Old Muslim Proverb)

Two great talkers will not travel far together (Spanish proverb)

Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings (Hodding Carter)

Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go (Truman Capote)

We took pictures of the native girls, but they weren't developed. But we're going back next year (Groucho Marx)

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment (Hilaire Belloc)

When in Rome, do as the Romans do

When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money (Susan Heller)

You can observe a lot by watching (Yogi Berra)

You can't see the whole sky through a bamboo tube (Japanese saying)

Li is the most popular family name in the world

160 cars can drive side by side on the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the world's widest road

A fifth of Israel's landmass is national parks - there are 300 of them

About one third of the earth's land surface is desert

Afghanistan has the world's widest temperature range : -50° … 53°C

Alaska has the highest percentage of people who walk to work

Almost half of all the pigs in the world are kept by farmers in China

Almost half of Ecuador is protected

Almost half the newspapers in the world are published in the United States and Canada

Although Tuvalu literally means "cluster of eight", there are nine islands in the nation

Andorra, Macau and San Marino have the highest life expectancies in the world

Andorrans are a minority in their own country, forming only about a quarter of the population

Approximately 70 percent of the earth is covered by water. Only 1 percent of this water is drinkable

Around 6.000 languages are currently spoken in the world

At their closest point, the Russian and U.S. borders are less than two miles apart

Austria was the first country to use post cards

Brazil takes up 47,8% of South America

Brunei has a cattle station in Willaroo, Australia that is larger than the sultanate itself

Canada has the longest coastline of any country: 90.325 km!

Coconuts kill more people in the world than sharks do, approximately 150 people each year

East Timor is the world's newest nation (2002)

Finland is the least corrupt nation in the world

France is with 75.500.000 arrivals the most visited country in the world

French Guiana's rain forest is 90% intact

Guinea has the wettest capital on Earth with 3,7 metres of rain a year

Half the foods eaten throughout the world today were developed by farmers in the Andes Mountains

Hong Kong consumes more oranges than anywhere else in the world

Hong Kong has more Rolls Royces per person than anywhere else in the world

Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure

If the river Congo's power could be harnessed, it would theoretically supply enough hydro-electricity to service all over Africa

In 1950 there were only 82 recognized independent states in the world

In 2001, there were 14.695 airports in the United States of America

In Arica, Chile it would take a century to fill a cup of coffee with rain (0,76 mm of rain a year)

In Cambodia, the sun goes down between 5 and 6 pm regardless of the time of year

In Djibouti, many Afar nomads still file their front teeth into ferocious-looking points

In Iceland, it is forbidden for parents to bestow foreign-sounding names on their children

In most parts of Asia, it is taboo to touch people’s heads, especially those of children

In New Zealand, chewing gum in public is considered impolite

In New Zealand, there are four sheep for each person

All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware (Martin Buber)

Every exit is an entry somewhere else (Tom Stoppard)

Every year it takes less time to fly across the Atlantic and more time to drive to the
office (Unknown)

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me (Sigmund Freud)

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter (Izaak Walton)

He travels best that knows when to return (Thomas More)

He who does not travel does not know the value of men (Moorish proverb)

He who would travel happily must travel light (St.Exupery)

I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world (Maryanne Radmacher-Hershey)

I am one of those who never knows the direction of my journey until I have almost arrived (Anna Louise Strong)

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate
them than to travel with them (Mark Twain)

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list (Susan Sontag)

I love to travel, but hate to arrive (Albert Einstein)

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train (Oscar Wilde)

I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine (Caskie Stinnett)

I won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because I won't fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation (Spalding Gray)

I wonder if one of the most important steps on our journey is the one in which we throw away the map

If you actually look like your passport photo, you aren't well enough to travel (Sir Vivian Fuchs)

If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home (James Michener)

In America, there are two classes of travel: first class, and with children (R. Benchley)

A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles (Tim Cahill)

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance (Anonymous)

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (Confucius)

A traveler without observation is a bird without wings (Moslih Eddin Saadi)

One always begins to forget a place as soon as it's left behind (Charles Dickens)