The map is not the territory.
—Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish-American Scientist, Philosopher of Language
If it’s tourist season, why can’t we kill them?
—Unknown
I have been a stranger in a strange land.
—The Holy Bible Scripture in the Christian Faith
Traveling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
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
The fool wanders; the wise man travels.
—Thomas Fuller (1608–61) English Cleric, Historian
I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty—his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist
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
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
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself.
—Walt Whitman (1819–92) American Poet, Essayist, Journalist, American, Poet, Essayist, Journalist
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
Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives—from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango—with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists stage.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
—Owen Feltham (1602–1668) English 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
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
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
Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.
—Charles Kuralt (1934–97) American Journalist, TV Personality
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
—Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) Scottish Novelist
Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist
They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.
—Brigitte Bardot (b.1934) French Film Star
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
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
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
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost—the lost valleys of the imagination.
—Alexander Claud Cockburn (1941–2012) Irish American Political Journalist
I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher