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.

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.”

A 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.

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.

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

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

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.”

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

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

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.

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.

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

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.