One should always have one’s boots on and be ready to leave.

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

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

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.

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.”

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.