Rolf Potts Quotes

The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home
and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.

— Rolf Potts

“Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from”

— Rolf Potts

“Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.”

— Rolf Potts

“Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.”

— Rolf Potts

“Having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment-not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.”

— Rolf Potts

“The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.”

— Rolf Potts

“For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. At home, you're conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.”

— Rolf Potts

Those who travel the world hoping to get "blinded by the light" are often blind to the light that's all around them.

— Rolf Potts

“In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) "the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it." We'd love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.”

— Rolf Potts

The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.

— Rolf Potts

“You should view each new travel frustration-sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict-as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure.”

— Rolf Potts

“Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. Dig?”

— Rolf Potts

“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”

— Rolf Potts

Vagabonding is an attitude-a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life-a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time-our only real commodity-and how we choose to use it.

— Rolf Potts

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope;

— Rolf Potts

To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.

— Rolf Potts

“The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability. As you begin to practice this openness, you'll quickly discover adventure in the simple reality of a world that defies your expectations. More often than not, you'll discover that "adventure" is a decision after the fact-a way of deciphering an event or an experience that you can't quite explain.”

— Rolf Potts

Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.

— Rolf Potts

“And let me tell you something. That first morning, when you are in your country of choice, away from all of the conventions of atypical, everyday lifestyle, looking around at your totally new surroundings, hearing strange languages, smelling strange, new smells, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. You'll feel like the luckiest person in the world.”

— Rolf Potts

For some reason, we see long-term travel to faraway lands as a recurring dream or an exotic temptation, but not something that applies to the here and now. Instead - out of our insane duty to fear, fashion, and monthly payments on things we don't really need - we quarantine our travels to short, frenzied bursts. In this way, as we throw our wealth at an abstract notion called "lifestyle," travel becomes just another accessory - a smooth-edged, encapsulated experience that we purchase the same way we buy clothing and furniture.

— Rolf Potts

“Neither self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you consume or own. Even”

— Rolf Potts

I think your travels get better when you stop showcasing your journey to others and begin to live it, quietly and joyfully.

— Rolf Potts

Begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.

— Rolf Potts

Time is the truest form of wealth. And the beauty is, we are all born equally rich in time.

— Rolf Potts

Travel compels you to discover your spiritual side by elimination: Without all the rituals, routines and possessions that give your life meaning at home, you're forced to look for meaning within yourself Indeed, if travel is a process that helps you 'find yourself', it's because it leaves you with nothing to hide behind - it yanks you out from the realm of rehearsed responses and dull comforts, and forces you into the present. Here, in the fleeting moment, you are left to improvise, to come to terms with your raw, true self.

— Rolf Potts

“Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.”

— Rolf Potts

“If in doubt, just walk until your day becomes interesting.”

— Rolf Potts

“Long-term travel doesn't require a massive bundle of cash; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.”

— Rolf Potts

“Of all the adventures and challenges that wait on the vagabonding road, the most difficult can be the act of coming home.”

— Rolf Potts

“Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time.”

— Rolf Potts

“At times, the biggest challenge in embracing simplicity will be the vague feeling of isolation that comes with it, since private sacrifice doesn't garner much attention in the frenetic world of mass culture.”

— Rolf Potts

“In a way, simplifying your life for vagabonding is easier than it sounds. This is because travel by its very nature demands simplicity. If you don't believe this, just go home and try stuffing everything you own into a backpack. This will never work, because no matter how meagerly you live at home, you can't match the scaled-down minimalism that travel requires.”

— Rolf Potts

“If you wander with open eyes and simple curiosity, you'll discover a much richer pleasure - the simple feeling of possibility that hums from every direction as you move from place to place.”

— Rolf Potts

“Zamunda represent everything that is kewl and real about vagabonding ... being the person that discovered Zamunda (for independent travelers) during the research of my book, Vagabonding, I am happy to see a well written guide done by the boyz and girl at BootsnAll”

— Rolf Potts

“The goal of preparation then is not knowing exactly where you'll go but being confident nonetheless that you'll get there.”

— Rolf Potts

“There is still an overwhelming social compulsion-an insanity of consensus, if you will-to get rich from life rather than live richly, to "do well" in the world instead of living well.”

— Rolf Potts

“In reality long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics, age, ideology, income, and everything to do with personal outlook.”

— Rolf Potts

“The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we're too poor to buy our freedom.”

— Rolf Potts

“Seeing' as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.”

— Rolf Potts

“Contrary to popular stereotypes, seeking simplicity doesn't require that you become a monk, a subsistence forager, or a wild-eyed revolutionary. Nor does it mean that you must unconditionally avoid the role of consumer. Rather, simplicity merely requires a bit of personal sacrifice: an adjustment of your habits and routines within consumer society itself.”

— Rolf Potts

“The mind can be a crazy monkey that is always dying to escape from the moment.”

— Rolf Potts

“What better way to discover the unknown than to follow your instincts instead of your plans.”

— Rolf Potts

Indeed, the most vivid travel experiences usually find you by accident, and the qualities that will make you fall in love with a place are rarely the features that took you there.

— Rolf Potts