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.

There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

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

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.

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.”

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.

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

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

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

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.

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

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