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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.