All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
Johann Wolfgang Von GoetheRead
Traveling is like gambling: it is always connected with winning and losing and generally where it is least expected we receive, more or less than what we hoped for.
Interpretation
Traveling brings unforeseen experiences that can lead to both positive and negative outcomes.
This quote by Goethe compares traveling to gambling, suggesting that both activities involve risk and the potential for unexpected results. Just as gamblers may win or lose regardless of their expectations, travelers often find that their journeys yield surprises, be they delightful or disappointing, challenging our preconceived notions of what to anticipate from our adventures.
In practice
This quote would be perfect to share during a travel seminar to illustrate the unpredictability of traveling.
All the knowledge I possess everyone else can acquire, but my heart is all my own.
Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.
There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From its springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.
I am amazed to see how deliberately I have entangled myself step by step. To have seen my position so clearly, and yet to have acted so like a child!
Seldom in the business and transactions of ordinary life, do we find the sympathy we want.
Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.
...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.
Vagabonding is an attitude β a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word.
Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.
A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.
And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it's a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.
The notion that before you even set out to go to Thailand, you say, 'I'm not interested,' or you're unwilling to try things that people take so personally and are so proud of and so generous with, I don't understand that, and I think it's rude. You're at Grandma's house, you eat what Grandma serves you.
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