Top 35 Bruce Chatwin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Travel doesn’t merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.”

— Bruce Chatwin

2. “Man’s real home is not a house, but the Road, and that life itself is a journey to be walked on foot.”

— Bruce Chatwin

3. “For life is a journey through a wilderness.”

— Bruce Chatwin

4. “Walking is a virtue, tourism is a deadly sin.”

— Bruce Chatwin

5. “To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.”

— Bruce Chatwin

6. “I pictured a low timber house with a shingled roof, caulked against storms, with blazing log fires inside and the walls lined with all the best books, somewhere to live when the rest of the world blew up.”

— Bruce Chatwin

7. “Life is a bridge. Cross over it, but build no house on it.”

— Bruce Chatwin

8. “It’s an old sailor’s idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home.”

— Bruce Chatwin

9. “Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely feeling of security.”

— Bruce Chatwin

10. “The song and the land are one.”

— Bruce Chatwin

11. “What am I doing here? Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia.”

— Bruce Chatwin

12. “A journey is a fragment of Hell.”

— Bruce Chatwin

13. “And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.”

— Bruce Chatwin

14. “I never liked Jules Verne, believing that the real was always more fantastic than the fantastical.”

— Bruce Chatwin

15. “When people start talking of man’s inhumanity to man it means they haven’t actually walked far enough.”

— Bruce Chatwin

16. “The word story is intended to alert the reader to the fact that, however closely the narrative may fit the facts, the fictional process has been at work.”

— Bruce Chatwin

17. “I haven’t got any special religion this morning. My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.”

— Bruce Chatwin

18. “Tyranny sets up its own echo-chamber.”

— Bruce Chatwin

19. “In Patagonia, the isolation makes it easy to exaggerate the person you are: the drinker drinks; the devout prays; the lonely grows lonelier, sometimes fatally.”

— Bruce Chatwin

20. “I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed’s dictum, ‘A journey is a fragment of Hell.’”

— Bruce Chatwin

21. “And when you look along the way we’ve come, there are spirals of vultures wheeling.”

— Bruce Chatwin

22. “Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians – with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds – project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one.”

— Bruce Chatwin

23. “Evolution intended us to be travelers... Settlement for any length of time, in cave or castle, has at best been... a drop in the ocean of evolutionary time.”

— Bruce Chatwin

24. “His legs withered. His stomach stretched taut as a drum. His skin erupted in watery pustules: whichever way he turned was agony. Phosphorescent centipedes crawled over him at night; and the vultures spattered him with ammoniac droppings, shuffling for position along the wall, and flexing their pinions with the noise of tearing silk.”

— Bruce Chatwin

25. “As you go along, you literally collect places. I’m fed up with going to places; I shan’t go to anymore.”

— Bruce Chatwin

26. “Even today, when an Aboriginal mother notices the first stirrings of speech in her child, she lets it handle the things of that particular country: leaves, fruit, insects and so forth. We give our children guns and computer games, Wendy said. They gave their children the land.”

— Bruce Chatwin

27. “I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.”

— Bruce Chatwin

28. “Proust, more perspicaciously than any other writer, reminds us that the ‘walks’ of childhood form the raw material of our intelligence.”

— Bruce Chatwin

29. “As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less ‘aggressive’ than sedentary ones.”

— Bruce Chatwin

30. “I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession. ‘As sanitary engineer?’ No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world.”

— Bruce Chatwin

31. “Richard Lee calculated that a Bushman child will be carried a distance of 4,900 miles before he begins to walk on his own. Since, during this rhythmic phase, he will be forever naming the contents of his territory, it is impossible he will not become a poet.”

— Bruce Chatwin

32. “Anything was better than to be loved for one’s things.”

— Bruce Chatwin

33. “Because they knew each other’s thoughts, they even quarrelled without speaking.”

— Bruce Chatwin

34. “As the young have discovered, the secret divinity of the twentieth century is Science. But Science is incapable of forming character. The more people talk of human sciences, the less effect human sciences have on man.”

— Bruce Chatwin

35. “I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul. Baudelaire, ‘Any Where Out of this World!”

— Bruce Chatwin

36. “Music’, said Arkady, ’is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.”

— Bruce Chatwin

37. “Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I’d want to murder.”

— Bruce Chatwin

38. “He went back to his solitary wanderings. Believing any set of four walls to be a tomb or a trap, he preferred to float over the most barren of open spaces.”

— Bruce Chatwin

39. “But the concepts of ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’, so essential to Western thought, are meaningless unless they are rooted to things. The first speakers of language took the raw material of their surroundings and pressed it into metaphor to suggest abstract ideas. The.”

— Bruce Chatwin