Certain travellers give the impression that they keep moving because only then do they feel fully alive.
Ella Maillart

Every time I took a long leave from home, I felt as if I were going to conquer the world. Or rather, take possession of what is my birthright, my inheritance.
Ella Maillart

From the beginning, I wanted to live my own life, and patiently I shored up that desire against wind and tide.
Ella Maillart

Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.
Ella Maillart

I am sure that instinctively we wish to be everything, to possess it-why cut the rose or marry the man, otherwise?
Ella Maillart

I can see now that a concept or even a feeling makes no sense unless out of our substance we spin around it a web of references, of relationships, of values.
Ella Maillart

I did not want to be depressed by the gap existing between my weakness and my ambition.
Ella Maillart

I gained direct knowledge of the life of the poor in big towns: I have lived the narrowing mechanism of its conditioning and feared it.
Ella Maillart

I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.
Ella Maillart

I refuse to imprison our acts in the rigid mould of sentences.
Ella Maillart


I wanted to learn a few foreign languages, and therefore I had to go abroad.
Ella Maillart

It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better.
Ella Maillart

Not only does travel give us a new system of reckoning, it also brings to the fore unknown aspects of our own self. Our consciousness being broadened and enriched, we shall judge ourselves more correctly.
Ella Maillart

One of the main points about travelling is to develop in us a feeling of solidarity, of that oneness without which no better world is possible.
Ella Maillart

One travels so as to learn once more how to marvel at life in the way a child does. And blessed be the poet, the artist who knows how to keep alive his sense of wonder.
Ella Maillart

One travels to escape from it all, but that is the great illusion: It cannot be done, since one travels with one's mind.
Ella Maillart

One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.
Ella Maillart

Only when one is able to grasp wideness can one possess it.
Ella Maillart

Others are keen to see if natives other than us live better than we do, without heat in pipes, ice in boxes, sunshine in bulbs, music on disks, or images gliding over a pale screen.
Ella Maillart

Shall we ever see the 10 million things of the universe simultaneously in order to be the all? I am convinced that to live is to travel towards the world's end.
Ella Maillart