If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

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

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.”

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.”

People 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.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.