Archive

Quotes

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.

—Jonathan Swift, 1726

Traveling is like gambling: it is ever connected with winning and losing, and generally where least expected we receive more or less than we hoped for.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1797

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

—Susan Sontag, 1977

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.

—Charles Kuralt, c. 1980

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

—Homer, c. 750 BC

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.

—Aldous Huxley, 1925

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.”

—Lisa St. Aubin de Terán, 1989

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

—Blaise Pascal, c. 1640

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

—Edward Gibbon, c. 1794

All traveling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity.

—John Ruskin, 1856

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.

—Lawrence Durrell, 1957

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

—Robert Runcie, 1988

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.”

—Daniel Boorstin, 1961