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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.”