Archive

Quotes

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, 1879

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, 1943

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

—Robert Burton, c. 1620

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.”

—Daniel Boorstin, 1961

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

—Homer, c. 750 BC

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.

—Aldous Huxley, 1925

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

—Susan Sontag, 1977

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.

—Jonathan Swift, 1726

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

—Richard Brathwaite, 1631

The 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, 1822

Those 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, 1747

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.”

—Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, 1989

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

—Charles Kuralt, c. 1980