Rolf Potts > Quotes

“In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Telling the story is not nearly as important as living the story. Indeed, your vagabonding experience need not be some quaint sand castle that washes away when you return home. If travel truly is the journey and not the destination, if travel really is an attitude of awareness and openness to new things, then any moment can be considered travel.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“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

“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

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

“It is the expectation itself that robs a bit of authenticity from the destinations we seek out”
― Rolf Potts, Marco Polo Didn't Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer

“In many ways, this transition into travel can be compared to childhood: Everything you see is new and emotionally affecting, basic tasks like eating and sleeping take on a heightened significance, and entertainment can be found in the simplest curiosities and novelties. “Suddenly you are five years old again,” Bill Bryson observed in Neither Here nor There. “You can’t read anything, you only have the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” In a certain sense, walking through new places with the instincts of a five-year-old is liberating. No longer are you bound to your past. In living so far away from your home, you’ll suddenly find yourself holding a clean slate. There’s no better opportunity to break old habits, face latent fears, and test out repressed facets of your personality. Socially, you’ll find it easier to be gregarious and open-minded. Mentally, you’ll feel engaged and optimistic, newly ready to listen and learn. And, as much as anything, you’ll find yourself abuzz with the peculiar feeling that you can choose to go in any direction (literally and figuratively) at any given moment. When”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“One of the more peculiar sins in medieval Christendom was curiositas, which St. Augustine defined as “the lust for experience and for knowledge.” As the rite of pilgrimage to places like Rome and Jerusalem became popular during the Middle Ages, church leaders fretted that curiositas might distract pilgrims from the task of religious piety. In the minds of many parish priests, a key danger of pilgrimage was that travel could be mind-expanding and pleasurable, and hence at odds with the prim prescriptions and hierarchies that underpinned their authority.”
― Rolf Potts, The Vagabond's Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel

“The problem with marijuana, however, is that it’s the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn’t force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“As you get past the first few weeks of your travel experience however, you’ll discover that partying on the road is different from partying at home. At home, partying is a way of celebrating the weekend or taking a pause from the workaday world. On the road, every moment is a weekend, every day a break from the workaday world. Thus, falling into a nightly ritual of partying - as can easily happen in traveler hangouts anywhere on the planet - is a sure way to overlook the subtlety of places, stunt your creativity, and trap yourself in the patterns of home. Granted, you can have plenty of fun in the process; but if you travel the world merely to indulge in the same kinds of diversions you enjoy at home, you’ll end up selling your experience short.”
― Rolf Potts

“Work is how you settle your financial and emotional debts—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

“vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal—not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out is mute,” wrote Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup.” By”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“From all your herds, a cup or two of milk, From all your granaries, a loaf of bread, In all your palace, only half a bed: Can man use more? And do you own the rest? —ANCIENT SANSKRIT POEM”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances. —ARISTOTLE, ETHICS”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“simplicity—both at home and on the road—affords you the time to seek renewed meaning in an oft-neglected commodity that can’t be bought at any price: life itself.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Quitting—whether a job or a habit—means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Traveler, there is no path, paths are made by walking. —ANTONIO MACHADO, CANTARES”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The traveler was active, he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience,” Daniel Boorstin opined in 1961. “The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“It is not speech which we should want to know: we should want to know the speaker. It is not things seen which we should want to know: we should know the seer. It is not sounds which we should want to know: we should know the hearer. It is not the mind which we should want to know: WE SHOULD KNOW THE THINKER. —FROM THE KAUSHITAKI UPANISHAD”
― 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.” —PAUL THEROUX, QUOTING TONY THE BEACHCOMBER, IN THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA    In this way, vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal—not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Travel is the best way we have of rescuing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction and ideology. —PICO IYER, “WHY WE TRAVEL”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea….Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it. And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely. —TIM CAHILL, “EXOTIC PLACES MADE ME DO IT”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“but words are symbols, and symbols never resonate the same for everyone.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The world is a book,” goes a saying attributed to Saint Augustine, “and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Piety and conformity to them that like, I am he who tauntingly compels men, women, nations, Crying, Leap from your seats and contend for your lives! Who are you that wanted only to be told what you knew before? Who are you that wanted only a book to join you in your nonsense? —WALT WHITMAN, “BY BLUE ONTARIO’S SHORE”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Interestingly, one of the initial impediments to open-mindedness is not ignorance but ideology. This is especially true in America, where (particularly in “progressive” circles) we have politicized open-mindedness to the point that it isn’t so open-minded anymore. Indeed, regardless of whether your sympathies lean to the left or the right, you aren’t going to learn anything new if you continually use politics as a lens through which to view the world. At home, political convictions are a tool for getting things done within your community; on the road, political convictions are a clumsy set of experiential blinders, compelling you to seek evidence for conclusions you’ve already drawn.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“In maintaining this open attitude toward misadventure, of course, it’s important that you don’t get carried away and inadvertently seek misadventure. It’s wise, for example, to keep a positive, adventuresome spirit while you endure malaria (as I did once, in a Bangkok hospital), but it’s foolish to invite such a misadventure through sloppy health habits. In the same way, getting robbed (as I was once, in Istanbul) might be rationalized afterward as part of the grand drama of travel, but it’s stupid to let your theft defenses go soft merely to keep things interesting. I”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“We see as we are,” said”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel