Updated July 9, 2021 1.5k votes 335 voters 22.8k views
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Vote up your favorite quotes from the beloved chef, author, and TV personality.
In honor of the late American celebrity chef, author, journalist, and travel documentarian, here are 15 of his most enlightening and entertaining quotes. Vote up your favorites below.
It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that's enlightenment enough — to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.
I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.
I’d put aside my psychotic rage, after many years being awful to line cooks, abusive to waiters, bullying to dishwashers. It’s terrible -- and counter-productive -- to make people feel like idiots for working hard for you.
- "Anthony Bourdain: ‘I put aside my psychotic rage, after many years being awful to cooks,’" The Guardian
In times of uncertainty and unpleasantness, when all around me seems to threaten to spin into chaos, it’s nice to have friends. It’s especially nice when those friends can cook.
If I do have any advice for anybody, any final thought, if I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in somebody else's shoes -- or at least eat their food -- it's a plus for everybody. Open your mind. Get up off the couch. Move.
