Quotations on / about travel

Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.

(Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. Letter, August 17, 1844, to Isaac Hecker, in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 6, p. 408, Houghton Mifflin (1906).)
More quotations from: Henry David Thoreau

A guide book is addressed to those who plan to follow the traveler, doing what he has done, but more selectively. A travel book, in its purest, is addressed to those who do not plan to follow the traveler at all, but who require the exotic or comic anomalies, wonders and scandals of the literary form romance which their own place or time cannot entirely supply.

(Paul Fussell (b. 1924), U.S. historian, critic, educator. "Travel Books as Literary Phenomena," Abroad: British Literacy Travelling Between the Wars, Oxford University Press (1980).)
More quotations from: Paul Fussell

I am reminded by my journey how exceedingly new this country still is. You have only to travel for a few days into the interior and back parts even of many of the old States, to come to that very America which the Northmen, and Cabot, and Gosnold, and Smith, and Raleigh visited.

(Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. "Ktaadn" (1848) in The Maine Woods (1864), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 3, p. 90, Houghton Mifflin (1906).)
More quotations from: Henry David Thoreau

Water, earth, air, fire, and the other parts of this structure of mine are no more instruments of your life than instruments of your death. Why do you fear your last day? It contributes no more to your death than each of the others. The last step does not cause the fatigue, but reveals it. All days travel toward death, the last one reaches it.

(Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French essayist. "That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die," The Essays (Les Essais), bk. I, ch. 20, Abel Langelier, Paris (1595).)
More quotations from: Michel de Montaigne

"If Steam has done nothing else, it has at least added a whole new Species to English Literature ... the booklets—the little thrilling romances, where the Murder comes at page fifteen, and the Wedding at page forty—surely they are due to Steam?"
"And when we travel by electricity—if I may venture to develop your theory—we shall have leaflets instead of booklets, and the Murder and the Wedding will come on the same page."

(Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832-1898), British author, mathematician, clergyman. Lady Muriel and the narrator, Sylvie and Bruno, Macmillan (1889).)
More quotations from: Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson]

In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those in a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous, and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to a contentless unit, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

(William James (1842-1910), U.S. psychologist, philosopher. Principles of Psychology, ch. 11 (1890).)
More quotations from: William James

Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.

(Herman Melville (1819-1891), U.S. author. "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" (1855), The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839-1860, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 9, eds. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (1987).)
More quotations from: Herman Melville

A man of travel, that hath seen the world.

(William Shakespeare (1564-1616), British dramatist, poet. Armado, in Love's Labor's Lost, act 5, sc. 1, l. 107-8. Making the claim for himself.)
More quotations from: William Shakespeare