“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.”

– St. Augustine, in Select Proverbs of All Nations (1824) p. 216, and later as, “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page”, as quoted in 20,000 Quips & Quotes (1995) by Evan Esar, p. 822.

This quote has not been located in Augustine’s writings, and may be a variant translation of an expression found in Le Cosmopolite (1753) by Fougeret de Monbron: “The universe is a sort of book, whose first page one has read when one has seen only one’s own country.”

Father Horton found the quote suspect for two reasons:
(1.) St. Augustine was not terribly well-travelled himself.
(2.) It doesn’t sound like him. He didn’t use metaphors much.

This entire investigation was triggered by Larry Durrell’s use of the quote and attributing it to Saint Augustine while writing a letter written in Paris in Season 4, Episode 3 of the television series, “The Durrells in Corfu.”

A long explanation for such a short quote, huh?