Socrates quoted by Seneca, Letters

How can you wonder your travels do you no good, when you carry yourself with you? You are saddled with the very thing that drove you away.

Muriel Spark, "Bang Bang You're Dead"

She did not know then that the price of allowing false opinions was the gradual loss of the capacity for forming true ones.

Muriel Spark, "Portobello Road"

It was another 10 years before she had learned those arts of leading a double life and listening to people ambiguously, which enabled her to mix without losing identity and to listen without boredom.

Agnes Callard, “The Case Against Travel”, The New Yorker

“Tourism” is what we call travelling when other people are doing it.

Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal

Most of all, beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

 

Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement

The most important element of the word recognition thus lies in its first syllable, which harks back to something prior, an already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge: a moment of recognition occurs when a prior awareness flashes before us, effecting an instant change in our understanding of that which is beheld. Yet this flash cannot appear spontaneously; it cannot disclose itself except in the presence of its lost other.