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

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 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.”

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

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

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.