One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580Quotes
Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1640There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
—Mark Twain, 1894Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, “I would stay here and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”
—Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, 1989See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.
—Robert Burton, c. 1620When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.
—Francis Bacon, 1625Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
—Fanny Burney, 1782A 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, 1726According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1794Traveling 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, 1797Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.
—Charles Kuralt, c. 1980After 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, 1935People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something.
—Søren Kierkegaard, 1843