Travel Quotes

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)    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

2)    The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. | St. Augustine

3)    A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. | Lao Tzu

4)    Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by. | Robert Frost

5)    Not all those who wander are lost. | J.R.R. Tolkien

6)   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

7)    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

8)    If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it’s lethal. | Paulo Coelho

9)    If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. | Lewis Carroll

10) The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. | Lao Tzu

11) Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer. | Unknown

12) I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. | Susan Sontag

13) You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut. | Dr. Seuss

14) Do not follow where the path may lead.  Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. | Ralph Waldo Emerson

15) One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. | Henry Miller

16) The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. | Marcel Proust

17) We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. | Unknown

18) I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before. | Unknown

19) 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

20) Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. | Helen Keller

21) The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. | Henry David Thoreau

22) There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars. | Jack Kerouac

23) The journey not the arrival matters. | T.S. Eliot

24) A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. | Tim Cahill

25) 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

26) Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen. | Benjamin Disraeli

27) 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

28) Only he that has traveled the road knows where the holes are deep. | Chinese Proverb

29) 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

30) Tourists don’t know where they’ve been; travelers don’t know where they’re going. | Paul Theroux

31) Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. | Francis Bacon

32) We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. | Hilaire Belloc

33)  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

34) Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness. | Ray Bradbury

35) 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

36) I was not born for one corner. The whole world is my native land. | Seneca

37) Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse. | Thomas Fuller

38) 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

39) 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

40) Take only memories, leave only footprints. | Chief Seattle

41) 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

42) He who does not travel does not know the value of men. | Moorish Proverb

43) 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

44) If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home. | James Michener

45) To travel is to evolve. | Pierre Bernardo

46) The traveler sees what he sees; the tourist sees what he has come to see. | G.K. Chesterton

47) 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

48) Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. | Ibn Battuta

49) If you can’t live longer, live deeper. | Italian Proverb

50) The more you read, the more things you will know. The more you learn, the more places you’ll go. | Dr. Seuss

51) Travel brings power and love back into your life. | Rumi

52) Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. | Ralph Waldo Emerson

53) Travel is like a giant blank canvas, and the painting on the canvas is only limited by one’s imagination. | Ross Morley

54) 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

55) 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

56) 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

57) I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world. | Mary Anne Radmacher

58) 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

59) 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

60) My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that, and I intend to end up there. | Rumi

61)  We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. | Anaïs Nin

62)  Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage. | Paulo Coelho

63) 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

64)  The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. | Agnes Replier

65) Better to see something once than to hear about it thousand times. | Asian Proverb

66)  Travel far enough, you meet yourself. | Cloud Atlas

67)  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

68)  Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. | Gustave Flaubert

69)  Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow. | Anita Desai

70) 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

71)  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

72) 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

73) I read; I travel; I become. | Derek Walcott

74) I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there. | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

75) 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

76)  Travel makes you realize that no matter how much you know, there’s always more to learn. | Nyssa P. Chopra, The Cultureur

77)  Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress: adventure. | J.K. Rowling

78)  I was never a big fan of people who don’t leave home. It just seems part of your duty in life. | Joan Didion

79) Travel is an investment in yourself. | Nyssa P. Chopra, The Cultureur

80) There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. | Robert Louis Stevenson

81)  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

82) We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth. | John Lubbock

83) 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

84) 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

85) I travel not to cross countries off a list, but to ignite passionate affairs with destinations. | Nyssa P. Chopra, The Cultureur

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