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.”

Those who travel heedlessly from place to place, observing only their distance from each other and attending only to their accommodation at the inn at night, set out fools, and will certainly return so.

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

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.

According to the law of custom, and perhaps of reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman.

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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.

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.