therefore i travel.

I found a brilliant book this past week while roaming through the travel section at the foreign book store. I am so inspired by the author's thoughts and wanted to share a few of my favorite quotes...

"If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest--in all its ardour and paradoxes--than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems-that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on where to travel, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of question neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modes ways contribute to an understanding of what the greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or "human flourishing."

"The plane a symbol of worldliness, carrying within itself a trace of all the lands it has crossed. Its eternal mobility offering an imaginative counterweight to feelings of stagnation and confinement."

"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships, or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thought, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape."

"If we find poetry in the service station and the motel, if we are drawn to the airport or the train carriage, it is perhaps because, despite their architectural compromises and discomforts, despite their garnish colours and harsh lighting, we implicity feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world."

-Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel