Traveling 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

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

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.