For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879Quotes
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.
—Gertrude Stein, 1943See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.
—Robert Burton, c. 1620The 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.”
—Daniel Boorstin, 1961There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.
—Homer, c. 750 BCIt 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.
—Aldous Huxley, 1925I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
—Susan Sontag, 1977A 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, 1726Travelers, poets, and liars are three words all of one significance.
—Richard Brathwaite, 1631The 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.
—William Hazlitt, 1822Those 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.
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 1747Traveling 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.”
—Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, 1989Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.
—Charles Kuralt, c. 1980