Life & Wisdom Quote by Ella Maillart

Against the lazy habit of treating “humanity” as a single character with a single storyline, Ella Maillart insists on irreducible plurality: “an infinity of different individuals.” The phrase has the clean, bracing feel of someone who has actually watched lives unfold outside the salon. Maillart, a travel writer who moved through interwar Europe and across Asia, isn’t romanticizing difference as a slogan; she’s recording it as a logistical fact. On the road, you learn quickly that the categories people love - nation, class, ideology - don’t reliably predict what someone will risk, want, or endure.

The second sentence tightens the screw. “Each of us travels” works as both literal itinerary and metaphor for a life in motion, and “motives exclusively his own” pushes back against the era’s craving for grand explanations. In the 1930s especially, mass movements promised to translate private longing into public destiny. Maillart’s subtext is skeptical: the crowd may march together, but the inner reasons rarely align. Even when people share a train car, a border crossing, a marriage, they are still propelled by personal hungers - escape, pride, curiosity, grief, the need to prove something to oneself.

There’s also a quiet ethical demand embedded here. If motives are “exclusively” individual, then moral judgment based on labels becomes flimsy. You can’t pretend to understand people by flattening them into “refugees,” “tourists,” “locals,” “believers,” “traitors.” Maillart’s line is a writer’s credo: pay attention, stay specific, and resist the comfort of the single story.