Sourced and curated.

It is delightful to read on the spot the impressions and opinions of tourists who visited a hundred years ago, in the vehicles and with the aesthetic prejudices of the period, the places which you are visiting now. The voyage ceases to be a mere tour through space; you travel through time and thought as well.

Aldous Huxley

1925

★ 0.9

Light (God's eldest daughter), is a principal beauty in a building.

Thomas Fuller (churchman)

The Holy State and the Profane State · 1642

★ 1.1

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

Robert Louis Stevenson

1879

★ 1.1

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 1.3

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 1.3

Virtue never has been as respectable as money.

The Innocents Abroad · 1869

★ 1.4

When in doubt, tell the truth.

Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World · 1897

★ 1.4

Deceive not thyself by overexpecting happiness in the married estate... Remember the nightingales which sing only some months in the spring, but commonly are silent when they have hatched their eggs.

Thomas Fuller (churchman)

The Holy State and the Profane State · 1642

★ 1.8

Personal journal · Travel writing

My definition of Man is, "a Cooking Animal." The beasts have memory, judgment, and all the faculties and passions of our mind, in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook... Man alone can dress a good dish; and every man whatever is more or less a cook, in seasoning what he himself eats.

James Boswell

1773

★ 1.8

It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how... And still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.

Henry Miller

1941

★ 1.8

Were I to... Take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, "In your lifetime, have you known peace?" wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in turn into his father, I would never hear the word "yes" if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years.

Rebecca West

1941

★ 1.8

Historical literature · Travel writing

The achieved West had given the United States something that no people had ever had before, an internal, domestic empire.

Bernard De Voto

1943

★ 1.8

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.

Francis Bacon

1625

★ 1.9

Why, sir, a man grows better humoured as he grows older. He improves by experience. When young, he thinks himself of great consequence, and every thing of importance. As he advances in life, he learns to think himself of no consequence, and little things of little importance; and so he becomes more patient, and better pleased.

Samuel Johnson

James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides · 1773

★ 1.9

What an odd thing tourism is. You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.

Bill Bryson

Neither Here Nor There · 1991

★ 1.9

When a traveller returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath travelled altogether behind him.

Francis Bacon

1625

★ 1.9

Travel writing · Satire

I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

Jonathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels · 1726

★ 2.0

A sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

Henry David Thoreau

1849

★ 2.0

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.