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.

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

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