I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.
—Brigitte Bardot (b.1934) French Film Star
A wise traveler never despises his own country.
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English Essayist
He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.
—Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) American Novelist, Short-Story Writer
Old men and far travelers may lie with authority.
—Unknown
No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
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 proper means of increasing the love we bear to our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.
—William Shenstone (1714–63) British Poet, Landscape Gardener
I would like to spend my whole life traveling, if I could borrow another life to spend at home.
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English Essayist
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
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
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
He who would travel happily must travel light.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900–44) French Novelist, Aviator
Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
Nothing tends so much to enlarge the mind as travelling, that is, making visits to other towns, cities, or countries beside those in which we were born and educated.
—Isaac Watts (1674–1748) English Hymn writer
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
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, Literary Critic
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
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
The local is a shabby thing. There’s nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine Writer, Essayist, Poet
Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.
—John Burroughs (1837–1921) American Naturalist, Writer
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
—John Steinbeck (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
Usually speaking, the worst bred person in company is a young traveller just returned from abroad.
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Irish Satirist
Travelling makes a man wiser, but less happy.
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American Head of State, Lawyer
Does this boat go to Europe, France?
—Anita Loos (1888–1981) American Actor, Novelist, Screenwriter
Any successful journey begins by packing your luggage full of imagination.
—Kathrine Palmer Peterson (1956–2006) American Author of Grief Books
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
I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor England! did I know till then what love I bore to thee.
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Poet
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
The bee, though it finds every rose has a thorn, comes back loaded with honey from his rambles, and why should not other tourists do the same.
—Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian Author, Humorist, Businessperson, Judge
A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious “retreat” of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.
—Cyril Connolly (1903–74) British Literary Critic, Writer
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
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
Some are found to travel with no other intent than that of understanding and collecting pictures, studying seals, and describing statues; on they travel from this cabinet of curiosities to that gallery of pictures; waste the prime of life in wonder; skilful in pictures; ignorant in men; yet impossible to be reclaimed, because their follies take shelter under the names of delicacy and taste.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
As the Spanish proverb says, “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him”—so it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
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
It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we’re always in other places, lost, like sheep.
—Janet Frame (1924–2004) New Zealand Novelist, Short-Story Writer
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 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
The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
The apples on the other side of the wall are the sweetest.
—Unknown
Those that say you can’t take it with you never saw a car packed for a vacation trip.
—Unknown
Know most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof.
—Thomas Fuller (1608–61) English Cleric, Historian
They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
A good holiday is one spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.
—J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) English Novelist, Playwright, Critic
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.
—Jane Austen (1775–1817) English Novelist
Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
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