10 Bill Bryson Travel Quotes to Inspire You to Explore More of the World

Need some travel inspiration? Here are 10 travel quotes for you by Bill Bryson which I hope will inspire you to explore more of the world.

1. Traveling is more fun—hell, life is more fun—if you can treat it as a series of impulses.

2. For a week, I walked till my feet steamed. And when I tired I sat with a coffee or sunned myself on a bench until I was ready to walk again.

3. I love to watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I know.

4. I mused for a few moments on the question of which was worse, to lead a life so boring that you are easily enchanted, or a life so full of stimulus that you are easily bored.

5. As my father always used to tell me, "you see, son, there's always someone in the world worse off than you." And I always used to think, "so?"

6. It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours—arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additions existence. Life, in short, just wants to be.

7. There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.

8. [Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. they just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts.

9. By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

10. Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homey restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it.