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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.”

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.

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.

If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.

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