“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Sometimes I can feel my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.”
— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”
— Saint Augustine

“For once you have tasted flight you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.”
— Leonardo da Vinci

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
— Virginia Woolf

“A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
— Lao Tzu

“A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
— John Steinbeck

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
— Hilaire Belloc

“A prayer for the wild at heart, kept in cages.”
— Tennessee Williams

“Do I dare / Disturb the universe?”
— T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
― Cheryl Strayed, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
— Steve Jobs

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”
— Joseph Campbell

“Remember that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.”
— Vicki Corona, Tahitian Choreographies

“When I was 5 years old, my mother told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”
― John Lennon

“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.”
― Maya Angelou

“The human spirit is stronger than anything that can happen to it.”
— C. C. Scott

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’ ”
— Erma Bombeck

“It does not do well to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”
— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone