Ella Maillart

“The true traveller is the one urged to move about for physical, aesthetic, intellectual as well as spiritual reasons.”

“Not only does travel give us a new system of reckoning, it also brings to the fore unknown aspects of our own self. Our consciousness being broadened and enriched, we shall judge ourselves more correctly.”

“Those who appreciate the ways of simple tribes, where every activity is direct and immediately understandable, are able to live among them.”

“When I crossed Asia with my friend Peter Fleming, we spoke to no one but each other during many months, and we covered exactly the same ground. Nevertheless my journey differed completely from his.”

“Words are impotent to describe certain emotions.”

“From the beginning, I wanted to live my own life, and patiently I shored up that desire against wind and tide.”

“It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better.”

“The timelessness of a concept has to be woven into the running warp of dying time, vertical power has to be wedded to the horizontal earth.”

“Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.”

“One travels to escape from it all, but that is the great illusion: It cannot be done, since one travels with one's mind.”

“Only when one is able to grasp wideness can one possess it.”

“Shall we ever see the 10 million things of the universe simultaneously in order to be the all? I am convinced that to live is to travel towards the world's end.”

“I refuse to imprison our acts in the rigid mould of sentences.”

“When I look at something, it is certain that for an instant I am one with what I see.”

“I am sure that instinctively we wish to be everything, to possess it - why cut the rose or marry the man, otherwise?”

“I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.”

“One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.”

“I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.”

“The wideness of the horizon has to be inside us, cannot be anywhere but inside us, otherwise what we speak about is geographic distances.”