Archive

Quotes

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

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

—Juvenal, c. 125

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

—Michel de Montaigne, 1580

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

When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.

—Francis Bacon, 1625

There is nothing worse for mortals than a wandering life.

—Homer, c. 750 BC

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

—Blaise Pascal, c. 1640

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.

—Samuel Johnson, 1777

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

—Richard Brathwaite, 1631

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

—Robert Louis Stevenson, 1879

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

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something.

—Søren Kierkegaard, 1843

Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.

—Fanny Burney, 1782