The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
Traveling is like gambling: it is always connected with winning and losing, and generally where it is least expected we receive, more or less than what we hoped for.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German Poet
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
—Alice Meynell (1847–1922) British Poet, Essayist, Suffragist
Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) French Poet, Art Critic, Essayist, Translator
The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.
—Paul Goodman (1911–72) American Novelist, Essayist
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.
—Guy Debord (1931–94) French Philosopher
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
—John Steinbeck (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
The alternative to a vacation is to stay home and tip every third person you see.
—Unknown
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost—the lost valleys of the imagination.
—Alexander Claud Cockburn (1941–2012) Irish American Political Journalist
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Comedian, Radio Personality
Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.
—Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) English Writer, Gardener
Every year it takes less time to fly across the Atlantic and more time to drive to the office.
—Unknown
A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist
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 (1912–90) English Novelist, Poet, Travel Writer
The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.
—George Ade (1866–1944) American Humorist, Playwright
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
—Owen Feltham (1602–68) English Essayist
If it’s tourist season, why can’t we kill them?
—Unknown
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Critic
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
—Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
—Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
—Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South African Novelist, Short-Story Writer
Only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
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.
—Soren Kierkegaard (1813–55) Danish Philosopher, Theologian
I was disappointed in Niagara—most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
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