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

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.

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

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

More and more I like to take a train. I understand why the French prefer it to automobiling—it is so much more sociable, and of course these days so much more of an adventure, and the irregularity of its regularity is fascinating.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.