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.

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.

I think that to get under the surface and really appreciate the beauty of any country, one has to go there poor.

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

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.

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

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

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

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.

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.”

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.