Twain on Travel, with a Capital T
My last posting about Pig Island may have been a bit critical of tourism, and that is my position for the most part. However, I am really BIG on Travel, with a capital T. You don’t have to be a tourist when you Travel. Tourism tends to put guardrails on one’s mind because of the expectations we often pack along with our Bermuda shorts. One of the history’s greatest Travelers was Samuel Clemens—aka, Mark Twain. Here are just a few of the things he had to say on the subject of Travel.
—Ray Brimble
Appleton’s Journal, 1874
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
―“Pudd'nhead Wilson”
“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”
―“Life on the Mississippi”
“The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.”
―“Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc”
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
—Mark Twain
“Travel is good for you. Good for the world. And good for our souls. Generally we're scared of what we don't know — and travel fills that void about each other.”
—Mark Twain
“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
—“Tom Sawyer Abroad”
Mark Twain, drawn riding his “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County,” appeared in the N.Y. Herald Tribune, 1873.