Ella Maillart (or Ella K. Maillart; 20 February 1903, Geneva – 27 March 1997, Chandolin) was a Swiss adventurer, travel writer and photographer, as well as a sportswoman.
The true traveller is the one urged to move about for physical, aesthetic, intellectual as well as spiritual reasons.
Happiness is the intoxication produced by the moment of poise between a satisfactory past and an immediate future, rich with promise.
We must develop a deeper interest and greater understanding of the people we meet here or abroad. Like us, they are passengers on board that mysterious ship called life.
I wanted to learn a few foreign languages, and therefore I had to go abroad.
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.
I am sure that instinctively we wish to be everything, to possess it-why cut the rose or marry the man, otherwise?
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.
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.
When the heart speaks, its language is the same under all latitudes.
I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch.
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.
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.
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.
There is only one valid species of voyage, which is walk towards the men.
I refuse to imprison our acts in the rigid mould of sentences.
The timelessness of a concept has to be woven into the running warp of dying time, vertical power has to be wedded to the horizontal earth.
Humanity is made up of an infinity of different individuals. Each of us travels for motives exclusively his own.
From the beginning, I wanted to live my own life, and patiently I shored up that desire against wind and tide.
You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.
One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.