Traveling 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.”

I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.

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.

More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling—it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.

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.

Those who travel heedlessly from place to place, observing only their distance from each other and attending only to their accommodation at the inn at night, set out fools, and will certainly return so.

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

I think that to get under the surface and really appreciate the beauty of any country, one has to go there poor.

Travelers, poets, and liars are three words all of one significance.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.

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.

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

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.