Life & Wisdom Quote by Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang slips a quiet bomb under the suitcase: the best travel isn’t optimized, it’s unmoored. In an era when travel is increasingly a performance of control - itineraries, guidebooks, brag-ready landmarks - he praises the opposite stance. The “good traveller” doesn’t know where he’s going, which reads less like incompetence than a refusal to turn the world into a checklist. Not knowing becomes a discipline: you enter a place on its terms, not yours.

The second clause sharpens into something almost Zen: the “perfect traveller” doesn’t know where he came from. That isn’t literal amnesia; it’s a critique of the ego as baggage. Origins can be a story we cling to for status, certainty, or grievance. Lin suggests that the deepest kind of wandering dissolves the need to keep narrating yourself as the protagonist with a fixed backstory. You’re not “someone from somewhere” collecting experiences; you’re a porous observer letting experience rewire you.

Context matters. Lin was a Chinese writer and translator who lived between cultures, writing for Western audiences about Chinese philosophy with a genial, skeptical clarity. This line echoes Daoist and Chan (Zen) suspicion of rigid identity and linear striving: when you stop gripping the map - and even the self - the world stops being scenery and becomes encounter.

It works because it flatters and provokes at once. “Good” is attainable; “perfect” is an impossible horizon that reframes travel as spiritual practice, not consumption.