There’s more to traveling than just packing your bags, getting on a plane, and going somewhere. With all its challenges, traveling means dealing with the unexpected. It’s brutal in its own way, because it forces you to trust complete strangers and lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends, especially if you’re traveling solo. It’s about holding on tight to the things that make you who you are while giving yourself permission to be a little different, too.
As a writer, I’ve always been fascinated by how much the act of travel can change a person. Whether it’s simply going from one place to another or something more profound and life-changing — such as moving to another country — travel has always seemed to me like an adventure that can change the way you see the world and your place in it.
Of course, some people never get around to traveling. Maybe they’re happy with their lives where they are, or perhaps they don’t have the time or money to make it happen. But for those who get out there and see new places, cultures, and people, travel can have a huge impact on their lives. It’s like being introduced to an entirely new existence. And it doesn’t even matter which kind of journey you’re looking for because the world seems built to please the eyes and heart of every traveling soul. And once you’ve experienced that, it’s hard not to want more of it! You meet so many interesting people along the way and find yourself becoming more comfortable with yourself as well. And then, one day, out of nowhere, you get hit by that epiphany of understanding that your world is so microscopic compared to what’s out there.
These last three years with the pandemic have been rough for travelers, and some people still can’t plan a trip and get around freely wherever they want. What about reading some of the best travel quotes to fuel your wanderlust while waiting for some better times? This collection of quotes about travel will help you get some travel inspiration for your next adventure. They’re all words of wisdom from some savvy women and men who have voyaged far and wide. Don’t forget to upvote your favorite ones!
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"Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.” – Ernest Hemingway
“To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Anderson
“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac
“Fill your life with experiences, not things. Have stories to tell, not stuff to show.” – Unknown
“I have found out that there ain't the no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” ― Mark Twain, "Tom Sawyer Abroad"
“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.” – Anthony Bourdain
“Travel teaches toleration.” – Benjamin Disraeli
Hell yeah it does. There are SO many fascinating people and places in our world and I've barely been out of the US/UK.
“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next to find ourselves.” – Pico Iyer
“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine of Hippo
“It is better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.” – Asian Proverb
“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
“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
“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
“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“It is not the destination where you end up but the mishaps and memories you create along the way.” – Penelope Riley
“To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, "Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything"
“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – Andre Gide
“There’s a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they’re absolutely free. Don’t miss so many of them.” – Jo Walton
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
“Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It is already tomorrow in Australia” – Charles M. Schulz
“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
“The gladdest moment in human life is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.” – Freya Stark
“The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.” – Henry David Thoreau
“And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity, and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” – Pico Iyer
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” – Shirley MacLaine
“When overseas you learn more about your own country, than you do the place you’re visiting.” – Clint Borgen
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
“I would rather own a little and see the world than own the world and see a little of it.” – Alexander Sattler
“Traveling is not something you’re good at. It’s something you do, like breathing.” – Gayle Foreman
“I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost
"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not." – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The only people who ever get anyplace interesting are the people who get lost.” – Henry David Thoreau
“Keep your face always toward the sunshine – and shadows will fall behind you.” – Walt Whitman
“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
“I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.” ― Brian Selznick, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret"
“Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.” ― Ma Jian, "Red Dust: A Path Through China"
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again, we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” ― Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"
“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.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“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
“You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.” – Paul Theroux
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
“Climb mountains, not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world.” – David McCullough Jr.
“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling
“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
“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
“You may say that I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will be as one.” – John Lennon
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ― Terry Pratchett, "A Hat Full of Sky"
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"
“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” ― Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
― Anaïs Nin, "The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974"
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton
“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”― Pascal Mercier, "Night Train to Lisbon"
“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
“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.”― Roman Payne, "The Wanderess"
“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
“Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.”
― Jack Kerouac, "On the Road"
“I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.” ― Roman Payne, "Rooftop Soliloquy"
“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, "The Prophet"
“There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, "Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps"
“Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.” ― Roman Payne, "Cities & Countries"
“The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.” – Wallace Stevens
“I always like to go to Washington D.C. It gives me a chance to visit my money.” – Bob Hope
