Rolf Potts > Quotes

“Someday” (“someday I’ll do this, someday I’ll do that”) is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you’re going to see just about all that you can handle. —PAUL AUSTER, SMOKE”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive. —JOSEPH CAMPBELL, THE”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.”
― Rolf Potts

“Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure. Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“For all the amazing experiences that await you in distant lands, the “meaningful” part of travel always starts at home, with a personal investment in the wonders to come.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“no combination of one-week or ten-day vacations will truly take you away from the life you lead at home.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“a petition campaign called Work to Live. The goal of this movement was to pass a law that would increase American vacation time to three weeks after one year on the job, and to four weeks after three years.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Pro and con lists—one of my previous favorites—are just as bad. If it’s important to you, and you want to do it eventually, just do it, and correct course along the way. Fortune favors the bold.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly,” wrote Henry Miller. “Everything…we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such.” Once”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Ironically, the best litmus test for measuring your vagabonding gumption is found not in travel but in the process of earning your freedom to travel. Earning your freedom, of course, involves work—and work is intrinsic to vagabonding for psychic reasons as much as financial ones. To see the psychic importance of work, one need look no further than people who travel the world on family money. Sometimes referred to as “trustafarians,” these folks are among the most visible and least happy wanderers in the travel milieu. Draping themselves in local fashions, they flit from one exotic travel scene to another, compulsively volunteering in local political causes, experimenting with exotic intoxicants, and dabbling in every non-Western religion imaginable. Talk to them, and they’ll tell you they’re searching for something “meaningful.”   And they say in truth that a man is made of desire. As his desire is, so is his faith. As his faith is, so are his works. As his works are, so he becomes. —THE SUPREME TEACHING OF THE UPANISHADS   What they’re really looking for, however, is the reason why they started traveling in the first place. Because they never worked for their freedom, their travel experiences have no personal reference—no connection to the rest of their lives. They are spending plenty of time and money on the road, but they never spent enough of themselves to begin with. Thus, their experience of travel has a diminished sense of value.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“They are spending plenty of time and money on the road, but they never spent enough of themselves to begin with. Thus, their experience of travel has a diminished sense of value.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The traveler sees what he sees,” wrote G. K. Chesterton in the 1920s, “the tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them….How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. —RAINER MARIA RILKE, LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“vagabonding is simply a matter of making work serve your interests,”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Slow down and remember this as you begin your travels: Being busy can be a form of laziness. Lazy thinking, and indiscriminate action. Being selective—in other words, doing less in a smart way—is usually the more productive and fun path. Focus on the quality of your experiences instead of the quantity. Get to know a few places really well, and try to avoid racing around the world on some over-ambitious itinerary, doing everything through your iPhone. In other words, try to live it and experience it, not just gather stories for later.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“If in doubt about what to do in a place, just start walking through your new environment. Walk until your day becomes interesting—even if this means wandering out of town and strolling the countryside. Eventually you’ll see a scene or meet a person that makes your walk worthwhile. If you get “lost” in the process, just take a bus or taxi to a local landmark and find your way back to your hotel from there.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“so that your travels are not an escape from your real life but a discovery of your real life.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“the Buddha whimsically pointed out that seeking happiness in one’s material desires is as absurd as “suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Unfortunately, life on the traveler circuit is not an unbroken succession of magical moments and mountaintop experiences—and some sights and activities can get redundant after a while. Moreover, the standard attractions of travel (from the temples of Luxor to the party beaches of the Caribbean) can become so crowded and jaded by their own popularity that it’s difficult to truly experience them. Indeed, one of the big clichés of modern travel is the fear of letdown at a place you’ve always dreamed of visiting.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Vagabonding involves taking an extended time-out from your normal life—six weeks, four months, two years—to travel the world on your own terms.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Instead—out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don’t really need—we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called “lifestyle,” travel becomes just another accessory—a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Thus, it’s important to keep in mind that you should never go vagabonding out of a vague sense of fashion or obligation. Vagabonding is not a social gesture, nor is it a moral high ground. It’s not a seamless twelve-step program of travel correctness or a political statement that demands the reinvention of society. Rather, it’s a personal act that demands only the realignment of self. If this personal realignment is not something you’re willing to confront (or, of course, if world travel isn’t your idea of a good time), you have the perfect right to leave vagabonding to those who feel the calling.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead - out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need - we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory - a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.”
― Rolf Potts

“Nevertheless, it’s important, even on a personal level, to not just look at things as we travel but to see things for what they are.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“A vacation, after all, merely rewards work. Vagabonding justifies it.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you’re not in a hurry.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel