Nicolas Bouvier famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you - or unmaking you.
-- Nicolas Bouvier

#Travel #Thinking #Motive
That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.
-- Nicolas Bouvier

#Water #Soul #Would Be
In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.
-- Nicolas Bouvier

#Heart #Love Life #Thinking
Traveling provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom. Indeed it involves a kind of reduction: deprived of oneâ€™s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like so much wrapping paper, the traveller finds himself reduced to more modest proportions - but also more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.
-- Nicolas Bouvier

#Believe #Sight #People
A journey does not need reasons. Before long, it proves to be reason enough in itself. One thinks that one is going to make a journey, yet soon it is the journey that makes or unmakes you.
-- Nicolas Bouvier

#Journey #Thinking #Long

I'm not lost for I know where I am. But however, where I am may be lost.
The tourist may complain of other tourists; but he would be lost without them. He may find them in his way, taking up the best seats in the motors, and the best tables in the hotel dining-rooms; but he grows amazingly intimate with them during the voyage, and not infrequently marries one of them when it is over.
We cannot learn to love other tourists,-the laws of nature forbid it,-but, meditating soberly on the impossibility of their loving us, we may reach some common platform of tolerance, some common exchange of recognition and amenity.
Do you remember the church across the sands? You stood outside and planned to travel the lands, where the pilgrims go. So you packed your world up inside a canvas sack, set off down the highway with your rings and Kerouac. Someone said they saw you in Nepal a long time back. Tell me why you look away, don't you have a word to say?
Because of a friend, life is a little stronger, fuller, more gracious thing for the friend's existence, whether he be near or far. If the friend is close at hand, that is best; but if he is far away he still is there to think of, to wonder about, to hear from, to write to, to share life and experience with, to serve, to honor, to admire, to love.
A person who is keen to shake your hand usually has something up his sleeve.
One must know ones enemy as he is, not as one, for whatever motives, wishes him to be.
The overcoming of adversity and, ultimately, denying it the rite of passage, has been a constant and perpetual motive throughout my life.
It is the man that makes the motive, and not the motive the man.
The distance is nothing when one has a motive.

Nicolas Bouvier famous quotes

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