The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.
—Juvenal, c. 125Quotes
See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.
—Robert Burton, c. 1620A 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.
—Jonathan Swift, 1726Traveling 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.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1797People 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.
—Søren Kierkegaard, 1843When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.
—Francis Bacon, 1625More 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.
—Gertrude Stein, 1943Travel 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.
—Anatole Broyard, 1989I think that to get under the surface and really appreciate the beauty of any country, one has to go there poor.
—Grace Moore, 1944Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.
—Blaise Pascal, c. 1640All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.
—John Ruskin, 1856The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
—Saint Augustine, c. 390After 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.
—Amelia Earhart, 1935