You know the old adage: Plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.
Elizabeth GilbertRead
to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.
Interpretation
Traveling enriches our lives and is worth any personal investment.
This quote by Elizabeth Gilbert emphasizes the profound value of travel as an experience that transcends material costs and sacrifices. It suggests that the benefits gained through exploring new places, cultures, and ideas far outweigh the financial or personal sacrifices one may encounter in the pursuit of such enriching experiences.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the benefits of travel in personal growth.
You know the old adage: Plant an expectation, reap a disappointment.
Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.
I had always been taught that the pursuit of happiness was my natural (even national) birthright. It is the emotional trademark of my culture to seek happiness. Not just any kind of happiness, either, but profound happiness, even soaring happiness. And what could possibly bring a person more soaring happiness than romantic love.
When I tried this morning, after an hour or so of unhappy thinking, to dip back into my meditation, I took a new idea with me: compassion. I asked my heart if it could please infuse my soul with a more generous perspective on my mind's workings. Instead of thinking that I was a failure, could I perhaps accept that I am only a human being--and a normal one, at that?
And when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt - this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty to find something beautiful within life no matter how slight.
But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilling yearnings.
Go at least once a year to a place you've never been before.
I think that travel comes from some deep urge to see the world, like the urge that brings up a worm in an Irish bog to see the moon when it is full.
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
You can always tell a Midwestern couple in Europe because they will be standing on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection looking at a windblown map and arguing over which way is west. European cities, with their wandering streets and undisciplined alleys, drive Midwesterners practically insane.
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