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.”

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

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

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

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.

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.

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

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

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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