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.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.