Archive

Quotes

Traveling is like gambling: it is ever connected with winning and losing, and generally where least expected we receive more or less than we hoped for.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1797

In the Middle Ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

—Robert Runcie, 1988

The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go on a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences—to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others.

—William Hazlitt, 1822

When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

—Aldous Huxley, 1925

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sightseeing.”

—Daniel Boorstin, 1961

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will—whatever we may think.

—Lawrence Durrell, 1957

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.

—Charles Kuralt, c. 1980

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

—Saint Augustine, c. 390

After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the aesthetic appeal of flying.

—Amelia Earhart, 1935

A traveler’s chief aim should be to make men wiser and better, and to improve their minds by the bad—as well as good—example of what they deliver concerning foreign places.

—Jonathan Swift, 1726

One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.

—Robert Burton, c. 1620