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.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747Quotes
One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.
—Michel de Montaigne, 1580According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.
—Edward Gibbon, c. 1794The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
—Saint Augustine, c. 390For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879The 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, 1961Journeys, 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, 1957Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
—Fanny Burney, 1782Traveling 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, 1797People 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, 1843After 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, 1935I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
—Susan Sontag, 1977Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1640