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 am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.

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.”

According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.

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.

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

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.

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.

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.

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

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

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