Zen and the Art of Travel.
Eric Chaline
2000. Sourcebooks, Naperville, IL. ISBN 1-57071-616-1

Excerpts

I had taken little with me outside of a change of clothes and a book. More important than what I had taken with me was what I left behind: my fear of the unknown - the fear that I could not make it and the fear of strangers - that every middle-class child learns from an early age. I then learned that the traveler, while not taking unnecessary risks, must unlearn these fears to set their minds free.

The pleasure I get from walking is the same each time: the sense of fitting into the landscape - whether it be the city or country - rather than passing fleetingly through it in a car or a train. I feel as if I belong there and am not just a "tourist".

Among the Native American tribes of the southwestern United States, a traveler who returns after a long journey is treated as a stranger, even by his closest friends and kin, until he or she has become reacquainted with home. We, however, are brought up to believe in an immutable "I" - a fixed personality existing through time and space - and fall into the trap of believing that when we return to the geographic origin of our journey, we have returned unchanged to an unchanging place called "home". But the journey's end is only the beginning of another journey: the rediscovery of both home and ourselves, our perceptions of which have been subtly or dramatically transformed by our absence.

Quotations

Francis Bacon
When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind.

Matsuo Basho
Amid the mountains of high summer, I bowed respectfully before the tall clogs of a statue, asking a blessing on my journey.

Swami Brahmananda
The world is so constructed, that if you wish to enjoy its pleasures, you also must endure its pains.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is a great difference between the beholders.

William Hazlitt
… the soul of a journey: Liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.

Oliver Wendell Holmes
Life is a great bundle of little things.

Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscape, but in having new eyes.

Zen Proverb
Do not seek the truth. Only cease to cherish opinions.

Emile Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is a great difference between traveling to see countries or to see people.

Shinso
No matter what road I travel, I'm going home.