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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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