The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.

My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone.

The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.

I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.

In America there are two classes of travel -- first class, and with children.

Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel --movement through space --provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions --perhaps one of the secret terrors --of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

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.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

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.

Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

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.

Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse

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.

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.

Of journeying the benefits are many: the freshness it bringeth to the heart, the seeing and hearing of marvelous things, the delight of beholding new cities, the meeting of unknown friends, and the learning of high manners.

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

Being on tour sends me crazy, I drink too much and out comes the John Mcenroe in me.

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.

If you look like your passport picture you're too ill to travel.

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.

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

Does this boat go to Europe, France?

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.

A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.

Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes.

Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

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

Journeys end in lovers meeting.

An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

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.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.

Travel is ninety percent anticipation and ten percent recollection.

Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, "I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station."

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Inter-railers are the ambulatory equivalent of Macdonald's, walking testimony to the erosion of French culture.

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.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.

Old men and far travelers may lie with authority.

The alternative to a vacation is to stay home and tip every third person you see.

I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience -- and laughter.

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.