Quotes about travel, and about cycling

There are many inspiring quotes about travel, and about cycling. The two lists below are some of my favourites.

I’ll begin with a short extract from  Peloton of Two. Catherine Pringle, a complete cycling novice, writes the following after her first day on a tandem tour around France:

There is absolutely no room on a tandem tour for a passenger. It’s a team effort, a relationship, two people pulling together to make something better than the sum of their parts.
It takes commitment and compromise. And it hurts. Boy, does it hurt! There are parts of me I didn’t know were capable of feeling this bad.
But here’s the shock. I’m beginning to think it might be worth it. Travelling by bicycle, moving through the landscape at your own pace and under your own steam, somehow lifts the spirits like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Yesterday’s struggle through a heavy rain squall around the Baie de Morlaix was proof of that. Yes, there was the pain. But with the suffering there was also an exhilaration, a pleasure that sometimes had me laughing through the tears.
– Catherine Pringle, Peloton of Two

Quotes about cycling

After a long day on my bicycle, I feel refreshed, cleansed, purified. I feel that I have established contact with my environment and that I am at peace. On days like that I am permeated with a profound gratitude for my bicycle.
– Paul de Vivie (“Vélocio”)

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them.
– Ernest Hemingway, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades

When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.
– Arthur Conan Doyle

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
– Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green

The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.
– Ann Strong, Minneapolis Tribune, 1895

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.
– Mark Twain

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.
– H. G. Wells

After your first day of cycling, one dream is inevitable. A memory of motion lingers in the muscles of your legs, and round and round they seem to go. You ride through Dreamland on wonderful dream bicycles that change and grow
– H. G. Wells

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you must keep moving.
– Albert Einstein

Quotes about travel

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
– Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

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.
– Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
– H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You

Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
– Pico Iyer

Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.
– Nicolas Bouvier, The Way of the World

Anyone who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveler.
– Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!
– Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.
– Hilaire Belloc

To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.
– Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography

Hello, I must be going, I cannot stay, I came to say, I must be going. I’m glad I came, but just the same, I must be going.
– Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers