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.

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.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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