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

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

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.

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

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.

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

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.”

There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

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

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

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.

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one’s own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live.

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