Here I’ve compiled a list of awesome travel quotes, which I hope can act as inspiration and motivation; quotes that will make you want to break out of the every-day routine and travel while you still can. These are quotes that I have compiled over a long time, and some of them you’ve probably seen around on various posts.
First – an honest remark
Truth to be told though, I’m personally not really a huge fan of listing quotes, as I believe they are much more impactful independently in more specific settings and contexts. Hehe, I am contradicting any reason you may have to read this article right now, but I gotta be honest. To me, reading a list of quotes, feels kinda like reading a dictionary; there’s a lot of good stuff and definitions but why are you reading it from cover to cover? Shouldn’t you just look up the word you want defined or discover a daily interesting word instead? Same could be true for quotes, either looking up something specific online or discovering a memorable quote on a certain photo, article or whatnot. If you’re a travel writer on the other hand, then you could perhaps copy this list and keep it for later.
But what the heck, let’s give it a try, and it’s good to see you’re still with me. I often notice that well-known and successful websites such as Addicted2Success and Lifehacker both post a huge amount of quotes-related content, so maybe there’s something to it. Let me know in the comments below what your thoughts are on the matter. And — enjoy the quotes. Maybe there’s some you really like.
My favourite is number #79. But I didn’t put that in the title because I don’t aim to create click baits! Hehe, imagine those typical perpetrators that would title this post something like “100+ Inspiring Travel Quotes That’s Gonna Change Your Life: The Ultimate List, #79 is Gonna Blow Your Mind!” Hehe, I hate those. But okay, sorry, enough digression, here are the 100+ travel quotes. Enjoy. 🙂
The 100+ quotes
- “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
– Mark Twain
. - “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
. - “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
– Samuel Johnson
. - “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
– Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth
. - “To know a person in his home is not to know him at all: to meet him on a country road with only his baggage is to at last contact the core, the inner cell of his personality.”
– John Tibbetts
. - “Once a year, go someplace you`ve never been before”
– Dalai Lama
. - “Travel Moulds A Man, People Mould His Wisdom And Experiences Mould His LIFE…!”
– Sujit Lalwani, Life Simplified!
. - “I travel to be replenished with beauty, for travel makes the beauty of this world seem like a Christmas that never ends.”
– Carew Papritz, The Legacy Letters: His Wife, His Children, His Final Gift
. - “Travel is the best teacher. The only way to an open mind is by taking a plane out into the open world.”
– C. JoyBell C.
. - “When I travel, people say ‘Yet another place in this world’. But I see ‘Another world inside every place I go”
– Vivek Thangaswamy
. - “Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life”
– Michael Palin
. - “Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.”
– Ryū Murakami, Coin Locker Babies
. - “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”
– Jawaharlal Nehru
. - “Personally I like going places where I don’t speak the language, don’t know anybody, don’t know my way around and don’t have any delusions that I’m in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.”
– Michael Mewshaw
. - “I didn’t know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.”
– Justina Chen
. - “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
– Lin Yutang
. - “There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.”
– Kate Douglas Wiggin, New Chronicles of Rebecca
. - “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
– Lao Tzu
. - “Not all those who wander are lost.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
. - “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
– Ernest Hemingway
. - “To travel is to live.”
– Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography
. - “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
– Henry Miller
. - “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.”
– Paul Fussell
. - “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
. - “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.”
– Moorish proverb
. - “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”
– Dagobert D. Runes
. - Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.”
– George Carlin
. - “Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.”
– Nikos Kazantzakis
. - “Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.”
– Blaise Pascal
. - “It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be.”
–Selma Lagerlauf
. - “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.”
– Roy M. Goodman
. - “Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover / Breath’s aware that will not keep. / Up, lad: when the journey’s over there’ll be time enough to sleep.”
– A. E. Housman
. - “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
. - “Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.”
– Louis L’Amour
. - “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.”
– Fitzhugh Mullan
. - “One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.”
– Alfred North Whitehead
. - “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.”
– William Least Heat Moon
. - “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.”
– The Dhammapada
. - “Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.”
– George Eliot
. - “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.”
– Samuel Johnson, on the Giant’s Causeway
. - “An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.”
– Iain Sinclair
. - “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
. - “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.”
– Alan Keightley
. - “Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.”
– Ray Bradbury
. - “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.”
– Kurt Vonnegut
. - “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
– Hilaire Belloc
. - “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”
– Susan Sontag
. - “I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.”
– William Hazlitt
. - “A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse… and thinks of home.”
– Carl Burns
. - “I love to travel, but hate to arrive.”
– Albert Einstein
. - “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.”
– Mohammed
. - “One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.”
– Charles Dickens
. - “When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.”
– Edward Dahlberg
. - “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.”
– Frank Herbert
. - “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did now know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
– Italo Calvino
. - “He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.”
– Sinclair Lewis
. - “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.”
– Unknown
. - “Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers… seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.”
– Paul Fussell
. - “Most of my treasured memories of travel are recollections of sitting.”
– Robert Thomas Allen
. - “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”
– Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey
. - “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.”
– John Muir
. - “When you’re traveling, ask the traveler for advice / not someone whose lameness keeps him in one place.”
– Rumi
. - “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.”
– Orson Welles
. - “To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.”
– Sam Keen
. - “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”
– G. K. Chesterton
. - “When you are everywhere, you are nowhere / When you are somewhere, you are everywhere.”
– Rumi
. - “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.”
– Susan Heller
. - “The autumn leaves are falling like rain / Although my neighbors are all barbarians / And you, you are a thousand miles away / There are always two cups at my table.”
– T’ang dynasty poem
. - “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
– Herman Melville
. - “People don’t take trips – trips take people.”
– John Steinbeck
. - “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
. - “It’s a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.”
– Tom Waits
. - “The map is not the territory.”
– Alfred Korzybski
. - “It is solved by walking.”
– Algerian proverb
. - “He who would travel happily must travel light.”
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry
. - “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
– John Steinbeck
. - “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
– Augustine of Hippo
. - “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.”
– Aldous Huxley
. - “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.”
– Samuel Johnson
. - “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
. - “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
– Cesare Pavese
. - “A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.”
– Moslih Eddin Saadi
. - “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”
– D. H. Lawrence
. - “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
– Freya Stark
. - “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things 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
. - “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
. - “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
–Martin Buber
. - “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”
– Paul Theroux
. - “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”
– Bill Bryson
. - “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
. - “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.”
– Robert Frost
. - “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.”
– Charles Dudley Warner
. - “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
– Lao Tzu
. - “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.”
– James Michener
. - “The journey not the arrival matters.”
– T. S. Eliot
. - “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
– Tim Cahill
. - “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
– Mark Twain
. - “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”
– Pat Conroy
. - “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”
– Benjamin Disraeli
. - “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
. - “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.”
– Elizabeth Drew
. - “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”
– Anatole France
. - “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”
– Seneca
. - “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.”
– William Least Heat Moon
. - “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
. - “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
– Aldous Huxley
. - “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.”
– Freya Stark
. - “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
– Rudyard Kipling
. - “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
– Paul Theroux
. - “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
. - “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
. - “A wise traveler never despises his own country.”
– Carlo Goldoni
. - “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”
– Mark Jenkins
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So, that’s it. What travel quotes did I miss? Which one was your favorite? Let us know in the comment field below.
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