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

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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