My Virtual Reading Room

“The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.”

(St. Augustine)
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“Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
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It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. Yet do this even till you can do better, and you may perhaps find some "Symmes' Hole" by which to get at the inside at last. England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all front on this private sea; but no bark from them has ventured out of sight of land,
though it is without doubt the direct way to India. If you would learn to speak all tongues and conform to customs of all nations,if you would travel further than all travellers, be naturalized in all climes,...Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters go to the wars, cowards that run away and enlist.
Start now on that farthest western way, which does not pause at the Mississippi orthe Pacific, nor conduct toward a worn-out China or Japan, but leads on direct, a tangent sphere, summer and winter, day and night, sun down, moon down, and at last earth down too.

- Thoreau, Walden