Memorable travel quotes are like messages found on the beach; beautiful, timeless, and read at just the right moment.
Editor’s Introduction – Tim Patterson: I’m typing on the deck of a hostel in a little Uruguayan surf town called Punta del Diablo.
Travelers are chatting around me; the usual conversation about where they came from and where they’re going next. Down on the beach, surfers are catching the last waves of the day and men driving horse-drawn carts haul firewood into town.
In many ways this is an idyllic scene, but to be honest, for a while today I was feeling a bit tired and jaded about travel. When you’re on the road too long the spark of newness fades, and travel can feel like a long, pointless slog, a detour from loved ones and from life.
Then I started reading the quotes you’ll find below. Some made me laugh. Some made me wince.
But all of them rang true, and reminded me of why I travel: to learn and grow, to challenge myself, stretch my limits and foster an appreciation of both the world at large and the chair waiting in front of the woodstove back home.
I hope you’ll find similar inspiration in these quotes. Without further ado…
The 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes Of All Time
1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine
3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
4. “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
5. “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
6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb
8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang
11. “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
12. “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
13. “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
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
14. “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
15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi
17. “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
18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark
19. “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
20. “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
21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber
22. “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.” – Jawaharial Nehru
23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux
24. “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
25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener
31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot
32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill
33. “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
34. “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
“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
37. “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
38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew
39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France
40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca
41. “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
42. “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
43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
44. “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
45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling
46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
47. “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
48. “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
49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni
50. “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
What quotes did we miss? Which one was your favorite? Please leave a comment below!
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This web site is beautiful. When my family and I travel I tell them that we are doing so as “God’s Ambassadors.” Travel is the best of all possible educations. Learning a bit of the languages of the places we will be visiting is a wonderful exercise for our minds. I am presently in the process of compiling, for self-publication, a book of prayers and meditations for travelers.
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Great quotes!
Another of my favorites:
“I am not the same having seen the moon rise on the other side of the world.”
~Mary Ann Rademacher↵ -
Great quotes! I like this one:
‘My country is the world and my religion is to do good.’
- Thomas Paine↵ -
“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
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An excerpt from “Travels with Charley” by Steinbeck. Lengthy but worth the time I think:
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured hat greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don’t improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This pat of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new hatched sin, will not think that they invented it.
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; not two are alike. And al plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blow-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only when do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand.– John Steinbeck
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My favorite quote is the J.R.R Tolkien one.
“Not all those who wander are lost.”Thanks for the great list. I’m going to link to this post on my travel blog.
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I love these thanks Lola!
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Great quotes! I’m looking for an African saying (perhaps a quote) that goes something like ‘If you want to travel quickly, go alone; if you want to travel far, go together.’ If anyone has any info on this please blog back or email to myemail.1999@yahoo.ca Thanks!
Al↵ -
a favorite that I quote often I first saw on a Gap advertisement on a bus shelter in NYC … don’t know who (if anyone) else to attribute it to …
“Travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living.”
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These are great. A favorite of mine has always been: “The true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust. It reminds me that I can “travel” a long way even if I don’t go very far.
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These are awesome.
One of my favorites:
“Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes.”
-Jan Myrdal↵ -
hey I have used it for my travel blog…its attractive and easy….
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I like this one
“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
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“We travel not to escape life, but so life doesn’t escape us”
written on the wall in a hostel in amsterdam.
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Travelling transforms existing world into real world.
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traveling is like a box of chooclates, u neverr no wat ur gunna get or where its gunna go
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“Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegu
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Great travel quotes .. my favourite is
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
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When I was attending college and having a diffcult time, a friend of mine sent me a card which read ” To try and fail is OK, not to try at all is a failure.” This has stay with me for 30yrs. I will always be grateful to my friend.
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How about….
“I have not been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”
-Susan Sontag↵ -
This is really cool!
I’ve always tried to carry this sentiment with me:
“These beautiful days must enrich all my life. They do not exist as
mere pictures – maps hung upon the walls of memory – but they
saturate themselves into every part of the body – and live always.”
~ John Muir↵ -
We shall not cease from exploration;
We shall not cease from exploration;
And at the end of all our exploration
Is to arrive where we started,
And know the place for the first time.T.S. Eliot
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The main purose of travelling is not todiscover new landscapes but to invent new eyes.
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Wonderful Quotes. Love them all.
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As an aspiring travel writer I want to thank you for this article. I actually printed it out and cut some of the quotes out to put around my desk, to remind me what I am striving toward. I know that there will be difficult times, but it will undoubtedly be worth the journey.
Thanks again!
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Dear Elizabeth,
This is beautiful. I hadn’t come acroos this quote before. Thanks.
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I love it! I used few of it in my personal blogs http://ellehctur.wordpress.com/. Thanks for sharing this wondeful insight.
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The quote “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
When i read that, this quote comes to mind “The world is a book, and those who travel have only read the first sentence of every page”, quite saddening =/ Its ashamed you cant meet all the people everywhere you go!
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I think you missed this one:
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.↵ -
One my travel i always have this in mind. My favorite quote
Follow your Bliss !!
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Some quite nice quotes out here.
Another of my favs:“Journeys end in lovers’ meeting; every wise man’s son doth know” [Shakespeare]
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What gives value to travel is fear. It is the fact that, at a certain moment, when we are so far from our own country we are seized by a vague fear, and an instinctive desire to go back to the protection of old habits. This is the most obvious benefit of travel. At that moment we are feverish but also porous, so that the slightest touch makes us quiver to the depths of our being. We come across a cascade of light, and there is eternity. This is why we should not say that we travel for pleasure.
— The Notebooks
Albert Camus↵ -
Great quotes! Thanks for the compilation!
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This is an awesome list! I hope you don’t mind that I borrowed some for my blog (dphelps28.wordpress.com). Here is one of my faves:
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness. ~Ray Bradbury
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One of the best quotes is an extract from Amyr Klink book:
A man must travel. By his own, not through stories, pictures, books or TV. He’s got to travel by himself, with his eyes and feet, to understand what is his. To one day plant his own trees and value them. Knowing the cold to enjoy the heat. And the opposite. Feel the distance and absence of shelter to be well under his own roof. A man must travel to places that he does not know to break this arrogance that makes us see the world as we imagine it, and not simply as it is or can be. That makes us teachers and doctors of what we have not seen, when we should be students, and simply go see ”
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A person visiting a country for the first time must not put any labels on anything, he should just enjoy observing”
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Thanks for this comment – it is wonderful. It really sums up how I feel about travel, and it is nice to know others feel the same way.
And, thanks for the initial post – an amazing collection of quotes to inspire me. I have a travel blog as well, and I love seeing others write about my passion!↵ -
Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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