Lapham’s Quarterly

When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.

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.

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

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.

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

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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 is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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

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

Those who travel heedlessly from place to place, observing only their distance from each other and attending only to their accommodation at the inn at night, set out fools, and will certainly return so.