According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.

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.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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

Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

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.