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.

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.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

The traveler with nothing on him sings in the robber’s face.

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

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

In the Middle Ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”