“Make voyages! Attempt them… there is nothing else!”
Stories about finding your heart and soul around the world.
“If you love a place you have a duty to protect it. To love it, you must know it first.”
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
“‘The Physics of The Quest’ = If you are brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting (which can be anything from your house to your bitter old resentments) and set out on a truth-seeking journey (either externally or internally), and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher, and if you are prepared––most of all––to face (and forgive) some very difficult realities about yourself….then truth will not be withheld from you.”
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
“Travel is a creative act — not simply loafing and inviting your soul, but feeding on the imagination, accounting for each fresh wonder, memorizing, and moving on... And the best landscapes, apparently dense or featureless, hold surprises if they are studied patiently, in kind of discomfort one can savor afterward.”
“Most people are on the world, not in it –– having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them –– undiffused, separated, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.”
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page”
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
“People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.”
“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
“You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational mind doesn’t nourish you. You assume that it gives you the truth, because the rational mind is the golden calf that this culture worships, but this is not true. Rationality squeezes out much that is rich and juicy and fascinating.”
“Let’s just anticipate that we (all of us) will disappoint ourselves somehow in the decade to come. Go ahead and let it happen. Let somebody else be a better mother than you for one afternoon. Let somebody else go to art school. Let somebody else have a happy marriage, while you foolishly pick the wrong guy. (Hell, I’ve done it; it’s survivable.) While you’re at it, take the wrong job. Move to the wrong city. Lose your temper in front of the boss, quit training for that marathon, wolf down a truckload of cupcakes the day after you start your diet. Blow it all catastrophically, in fact, and then start over with good cheer. This is what we all must learn to do, for this is how maps get charted—by taking wrong turns that lead to surprising passageways that open into spectacularly unexpected new worlds. So just march on. Future generations will thank you—trust me—for showing the way, for beating brave new footpaths out of wonky old mistakes.”
Alice: If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary-wise; what it is it wouldn’t be, and what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?
Alice: Where I come from, people study what they are not good at in order to be able to do what they are good at.
Mad Hatter: We only go around in circles in Wonderland, but we always end up where we started. Would you mind explaining yourself?
Alice: Well, grown-ups tell us to find out what we did wrong, and never do it again.
Mad Hatter: That’s odd! It seems to me that in order to find out about something, you have to study it. And when you study it, you should become better at it. Why should you want to become better at something and then never do it again? But please continue.
Alice: Nobody ever tells us to study the right things we do. We’re only supposed to learn from the wrong things. But we are permitted to study the right things other people do. And sometimes we’re even told to copy them.
Mad Hatter: That’s cheating!
Alice: You’re quite right, Mr. Hatter. I do live in a topsy-turvy world. It seems like I have to do something wrong first, in order to learn from what not to do. And then, by not doing what I’m not supposed to do, perhaps I’ll be right. But I’d rather be right the first time, wouldn’t you?
My heart is in Michigan.
My mind is in Los Angeles.
My spirit is in Paris.
My dreams are in Italy.
“Everyone has ocean’s to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?”
On returning from Italy, this was exactly how I felt:
“Now, little by little, I redeveloped an eye for the humors of life, and I found it easier and increasingly possible to reconcile myself with my fate and not begrudge myself the odd tasty morsel or so in the feast of life. Indeed, when you travel back home from Italy, it is always like that. You snap your fingers at principles and prejudices, smile indulgently, thrust your hands in your trouser-pockets and see yourself as a shrewd man of the world. You have moved around for a brief while in the comfortable and warm life of the South and you are under the illusion that it will continue like that in your own country. Those were my feelings every time I came back from Italy and more especially on that occasion. When I reached Basel and found the old, inflexible way of life, unchanged and unchangeable, depressed and angry, I graudally left my gaiety behind and came down to earth. But I had gained something from my experiences and never after this did my small boat sail through clear or troubled water without at least one colored pennant fluttering its confident defiance.”
- Herman Hesse, from Peter Camenzind
“You’re the strangest person I ever met, she said and I said you too and we decided we’d know each other a long time.”
“I think one of the most odd things about learning is the moment where you know enough to realize how much you don’t know.”