A Curated Collection of Inspiring Travel Quotes to Satisfy Your Wanderlust
Travel quotes are often overflowing with inspiration; some can spawn future trips, some can instill a newfound vitality into present trips, and some can heighten our levels of introspection from past trips. They’re best considered as guides rather than rules. Sometimes they contradict one another, suggesting a greater truth – the existence of a broad range of relationships between destinations and individuals. While some quotes will inspire and enlighten more than others, they all serve to push our limits, fashion new thought processes, and foster an appreciation for all that we have.
Like my own personal travel style, my list of travel quotes is comprised of ½ iconic + ½ off-the-beaten path. You might have some of these already etched into your stream of consciousness, while others you might have heard only once or twice, or even never.
Although clichéd, I must start the list off with my all-time favorite travel quote, one that has found a home in my email signature, and one that guides my daily life…
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1) [ictt-tweet-inline]Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. | Mark Twain[/ictt-tweet-inline]
2) [ictt-tweet-inline]The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. | St. Augustine[/ictt-tweet-inline]
3) [ictt-tweet-inline]A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. | Lao Tzu[/ictt-tweet-inline]
4) [ictt-tweet-inline]Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by. | Robert Frost[/ictt-tweet-inline]
5) [ictt-tweet-inline]Not all those who wander are lost. | J.R.R. Tolkien[/ictt-tweet-inline]
6) [ictt-tweet-inline]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[/ictt-tweet-inline]
7) [ictt-tweet-inline]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[/ictt-tweet-inline]
8) [ictt-tweet-inline]If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it’s lethal. | Paulo Coelho[/ictt-tweet-inline]
9) [ictt-tweet-inline]If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. | Lewis Carroll[/ictt-tweet-inline]
10) [ictt-tweet-inline]The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. | Lao Tzu[/ictt-tweet-inline]
11) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer. | Unknown[/ictt-tweet-inline]
12) [ictt-tweet-inline]I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. | Susan Sontag[/ictt-tweet-inline]
13) [ictt-tweet-inline]You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut. | Dr. Seuss[/ictt-tweet-inline]
14) [ictt-tweet-inline]Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. | Ralph Waldo Emerson[/ictt-tweet-inline]
15) [ictt-tweet-inline]One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. | Henry Miller[/ictt-tweet-inline]
16) [ictt-tweet-inline]The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. | Marcel Proust[/ictt-tweet-inline]
17) [ictt-tweet-inline]We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. | Unknown[/ictt-tweet-inline]
18) [ictt-tweet-inline]I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before. | Unknown[/ictt-tweet-inline]
19) [ictt-tweet-inline]Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what’s right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in. | Andrew Zimmern[/ictt-tweet-inline]
20) [ictt-tweet-inline]Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. | Helen Keller[/ictt-tweet-inline]
21) [ictt-tweet-inline]The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. | Henry David Thoreau[/ictt-tweet-inline]
22) [ictt-tweet-inline]There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars. | Jack Kerouac[/ictt-tweet-inline]
23) [ictt-tweet-inline]The journey not the arrival matters. | T.S. Eliot[/ictt-tweet-inline]
24) [ictt-tweet-inline]A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. | Tim Cahill[/ictt-tweet-inline]
25) [ictt-tweet-inline]I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like the people or hate them than to travel with them. | Mark Twain[/ictt-tweet-inline]
26) [ictt-tweet-inline]Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen. | Benjamin Disraeli[/ictt-tweet-inline]
27) [ictt-tweet-inline]I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within. | Lillian Smith[/ictt-tweet-inline]
28) [ictt-tweet-inline]Only he that has traveled the road knows where the holes are deep. | Chinese Proverb[/ictt-tweet-inline]
29) [ictt-tweet-inline]Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but, by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends. | Maya Angelou[/ictt-tweet-inline]
30) [ictt-tweet-inline]Tourists don’t know where they’ve been; travelers don’t know where they’re going. | Paul Theroux[/ictt-tweet-inline]
31) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. | Francis Bacon[/ictt-tweet-inline]
32) [ictt-tweet-inline]We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. | Hilaire Belloc[/ictt-tweet-inline]
33) [ictt-tweet-inline]The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes ‘sight seeing.’ | Daniel J. Boorstin[/ictt-tweet-inline]
34) [ictt-tweet-inline]Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness. | Ray Bradbury[/ictt-tweet-inline]
35) [ictt-tweet-inline]If Obama wins, I’m leaving the country. If Romney wins, I’m leaving the country. This has nothing to do with politics; I just want to travel. | Unknown[/ictt-tweet-inline]
36) [ictt-tweet-inline]I was not born for one corner. The whole world is my native land. | Seneca[/ictt-tweet-inline]
37) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse. | Thomas Fuller[/ictt-tweet-inline]
38) [ictt-tweet-inline]I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth. Then I ask myself the same question. | Harun Yahya[/ictt-tweet-inline]
39) [ictt-tweet-inline]When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable. | Clifton Fadiman[/ictt-tweet-inline]
40) [ictt-tweet-inline]Take only memories, leave only footprints. | Chief Seattle[/ictt-tweet-inline]
41) [ictt-tweet-inline]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[/ictt-tweet-inline]
42) [ictt-tweet-inline]He who does not travel does not know the value of men. | Moorish Proverb[/ictt-tweet-inline]
43) [ictt-tweet-inline]The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before. | Albert Einstein[/ictt-tweet-inline]
44) [ictt-tweet-inline]If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home. | James Michener[/ictt-tweet-inline]
45) [ictt-tweet-inline]To travel is to evolve. | Pierre Bernardo[/ictt-tweet-inline]
46) [ictt-tweet-inline]The traveler sees what he sees; the tourist sees what he has come to see. | G.K. Chesterton[/ictt-tweet-inline]
47) [ictt-tweet-inline]We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. | Pico Iyer[/ictt-tweet-inline]
48) [ictt-tweet-inline]Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. | Ibn Battuta[/ictt-tweet-inline]
49) [ictt-tweet-inline]If you can’t live longer, live deeper. | Italian Proverb[/ictt-tweet-inline]
50) [ictt-tweet-inline]The more you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you’ll go. | Dr. Seuss[/ictt-tweet-inline]
51) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel brings power and love back into your life. | Rumi[/ictt-tweet-inline]
52) [ictt-tweet-inline]Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. | Ralph Waldo Emerson[/ictt-tweet-inline]
53) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel is like a giant blank canvas, and the painting on the canvas is only limited by one’s imagination. | Ross Morley[/ictt-tweet-inline]
54) [ictt-tweet-inline]Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey. | Pat Conroy[/ictt-tweet-inline]
55) [ictt-tweet-inline]Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’ | Lisa. St. Aubin de Teran[/ictt-tweet-inline]
56) [ictt-tweet-inline]Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone…It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it? | Donald Miller[/ictt-tweet-inline]
57) [ictt-tweet-inline]I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world. | Mary Anne Radmacher[/ictt-tweet-inline]
58) [ictt-tweet-inline]As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own. | Margaret Mead[/ictt-tweet-inline]
59) [ictt-tweet-inline]Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. | Miriam Beard[/ictt-tweet-inline]
60) [ictt-tweet-inline]My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. | Rumi[/ictt-tweet-inline]
61) [ictt-tweet-inline]We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. | Anaïs Nin[/ictt-tweet-inline]
62) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage. | Paulo Coelho[/ictt-tweet-inline]
63) [ictt-tweet-inline]We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic to creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything. | Jonah Lehrer[/ictt-tweet-inline]
64) [ictt-tweet-inline]The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. | Agnes Replier[/ictt-tweet-inline]
65) [ictt-tweet-inline]Better to see something once than to hear about it thousand times. | Asian Proverb[/ictt-tweet-inline]
66) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel far enough, you meet yourself. | Cloud Atlas[/ictt-tweet-inline]
67) [ictt-tweet-inline]Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground. | Judith Thurman[/ictt-tweet-inline]
68) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. | Gustave Flaubert[/ictt-tweet-inline]
69) [ictt-tweet-inline]Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow. | Anita Desai[/ictt-tweet-inline]
70) [ictt-tweet-inline]To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live. | Hans Christian Andersen[/ictt-tweet-inline]
71) [ictt-tweet-inline]We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered. | Kahlil Gibran[/ictt-tweet-inline]
72) [ictt-tweet-inline]Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere. | Isabelle Eberhardt[/ictt-tweet-inline]
73) [ictt-tweet-inline]I read; I travel; I become. | Derek Walcott[/ictt-tweet-inline]
74) [ictt-tweet-inline]I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie[/ictt-tweet-inline]
75) [ictt-tweet-inline]But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses. | Bill Bryson[/ictt-tweet-inline]
76) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel makes you realize that no matter how much you know, there’s always more to learn. | Nyssa P. Chopra, The Cultureur[/ictt-tweet-inline]
77) [ictt-tweet-inline]Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress: adventure. | J.K. Rowling[/ictt-tweet-inline]
78) [ictt-tweet-inline]I was never a big fan of people who don’t leave home. It just seems part of your duty in life. | Joan Didion[/ictt-tweet-inline]
79) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel is an investment in yourself. | Nyssa P. Chopra, The Cultureur[/ictt-tweet-inline]
80) [ictt-tweet-inline]There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. | Robert Louis Stevenson[/ictt-tweet-inline]
81) [ictt-tweet-inline]Luxury travel is about the experience, not just the appearance. Luxury travel may be glamorous, but not always meaningful. Local culture may not always be glamorous, but it’s always meaningful. | Nyssa P. Chopra, The Cultureur[/ictt-tweet-inline]
82) [ictt-tweet-inline]We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth. | John Lubbock[/ictt-tweet-inline]
83) [ictt-tweet-inline]Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind. | Anthony Bourdain[/ictt-tweet-inline]
84) [ictt-tweet-inline]Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere. | Isabelle Eberhardt[/ictt-tweet-inline]
85) [ictt-tweet-inline]I travel not to cross countries off a list, but to ignite passionate affairs with destinations. | Nyssa P. Chopra, The Cultureur[/ictt-tweet-inline]
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