Here is a list of over 125 of the best travel quotes to inspire your life and travels, including some of my favorites. I hope these travel quotes encourage you to get out there, explore the world, and live your best life!
“Traveling – It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battutah
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
“Travel. As much as you can. As far as you can. As long as you can. Life’s not meant to be lived in one place.” – Unknown
“If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs.” – Tony Gaskin
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.” – Nelson Mandela
“To die is an inevitable reality for all of us, but an existence of unrealized potential, fear of failure and regret is not.” – Helen Suk
“And then there is the most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.” – Randy Komisar
“The cost of not following your dream, your heart, or your gut, is spending the rest of your life wishing you had.” – Unknown
“I haven’t been everywhere, but it is on my list.” – Susan Sontag
“Maybe all I need to do is lose myself to find me.” – Keiko Sledge, “I’ll Find Me”
“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
“You don’t have to be rich to travel well.” – Eugene Fodor
Traveling – It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. – Ibn Battutah
“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.” – André Gide
“A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are for.” – John A. Shedd
“I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question.” – Harun Yahya
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines! Sail away from safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover!” – H. Brown, Jr., P.S. I Love You: When Mom Wrote, She Always Saved the Best for Last
“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
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G.K. Chesterton
“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters
“Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.” – Erol Ozan
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness… 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, Innocents Abroad
“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
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. – Lao Tzu
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine of Hippo
“One does not cross a river without getting wet.” – African proverb
“If a single hair falls from your head you are not yet bald.” – Sierra Leonean proverb
“When the moon is not yet full, the stars shine more brightly.” – Ugandan proverb
“To one who does not know, a small garden is a forest.” Ethiopian proverb
“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.” – Cesare Pavase
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber
“All the pathos and the irony of leaving one’s youth behind is 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
“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree. One is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.” – Roman Payne, The Wandress
“To get lost is to learn the way.” – African proverb
“Africa has her mysteries, and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.” – Miriam Makeba
“It is better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.” – Asian proverb
Travel. As much as you can. As far as you can. As long as you can. Life’s not meant to be lived in one place. – Unknown
“You cannot leave Africa,” Africa said, “It is always with you, there inside your head. Our rivers run in currents in the swirl of your thumbprints; Our drumbeats counting out your pulse; Our coastline, the silhouette of your soul.” – Bridge Dore
“Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.” – Jennifer Lee
“Africa changes you forever, like nowhere on earth. Once you have been there, you will never be the same. But how do you begin to describe the magic to someone who has never felt it? How can you explain the fascination of this vast, dusty continent, whose oldest roads are elephant paths? Could it be because Africa is the place of all our beginnings, the cradle of mankind, where our species first stood upright on the savannas of long ago?” – Brian Jackman
“Half the fun of travel is the aesthetic of lostness.” – Ray Bradbury
“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
“Adventure may hurt you but monotony will kill you.” – Unknown
“I didn’t know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.” – Justina Chen
“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
“Tourists went on holidays while travelers did something else. They traveled.” – Alex Garland, The Beach
“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that g**d*** mountain.” – Esquire magazine’s description of Jack Kerouac’s book The Dharma Bums in “The 80 Best Books Every Man Should Read”
“Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.” – Chinese proverb
If you don’t build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs. – Tony Gaskin
“We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” – Robyn Yong
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James A. Michener
“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.” – John Hope Franklin
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost
“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.” – W. H. Auden
“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
“Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Fitzhugh Mullen
“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” – David Mitchell
“I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.” – James Baldwin
“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy
“Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew
“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” – Lawrence Block
To die is an inevitable reality for all of us, but an existence of unrealized potential, fear of failure and regret is not. – Helen Suk
“A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.” – Emile Ganest
“It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves – in finding themselves.” – André Gide
“Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel’s immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells, and sounds, but with the experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way.” – Ralph Crawshaw
“An adventure may be worn as a muddy spot or it may be worn as a proud insignia. It is the woman wearing it who makes it the one thing or the other.” – Norma Shearer
“Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country coast to coast without seeing anything.” – Charles Kuralt
“No matter where you go, there you are.” – Unknown
“You don’t choose the day you enter the world and you don’t chose the day you leave. It’s what you do in between that makes all the difference.” – Anita Septimus
“I travel because it makes me realize how much I haven’t seen, how much I’m not going to see, and how much I still need to see.” – Carew Papritz
“It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau
“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half your clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.” – Oscar Wilde
“Only he that has traveled the road knows where the holes are deep.” – Chinese proverb
The cost of not following your dream, your heart, or your gut, is spending the rest of your life wishing you had. – Unknown
“The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been before.” – Alan Ashley-Pitt
“I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” Mary Anne Radmacher
“My soul is from elsewhere, I am sure of that, and I intend to end up there.” – Rumi
“We travel because we need to… When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.” – Jonah Lehrer
“…Luxury travel may be glamorous, but not always meaningful. Local culture may not always be glamorous, but it’s always meaningful.” – Nyssa P. Chopra
“I’ll look back on this and smile because it was life and I decided to live it.” – Unknown
“There are seven days in a week and ‘someday’ isn’t one of them.” – Benny Lewis
“Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.” – Saber Ben Hassen
“If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” – Rachel Wolchin
“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it!” – Jonathan Winters
Maybe all I need to do is lose myself to find me. – Keiko Sledge, “I’ll Find Me”
“…[T]here is more to this world than ‘home’.” – Pete Rojwongsuriya
“He who is outside his door has the hardest part of his journey behind him.” – Flemish/Danish proverb
“When traveling, I start another day where everything will be new. I get to live days that will not be repeated …” – Angel Castellanos
“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to experience everyday things as for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” – Bill Bryson
“As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life” – Jack Kornfield, Buddha’s Little Instruction Book
“Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might be a mutual love, or dislike, or friendship, or enmity… Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.” – Roman Payne, Cities & Countries
“At every phase in your life, look at your options. Please do not select the boring ones.” – Barbara Hillary
“Now more than ever do I realize I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.” – Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
“Nothing behind me, everything in front of me, as is ever so on the road” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. – Aldous Huxley
“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, Into Every Life a Little Zen Must Fall: A Christian Philosopher Looks to Alan Watts and the East
“It seems the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn…” – Anthony Bourdain
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
“Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” – T.S. Eliot
“Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.” – Oscar Wilde
“Since life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.” – Simon Raven
“Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints.” – Chief Seattle, Duwamish chief
“Jobs fill your pocket. Adventures fill your soul.” – Jaime Lyn Beatty
“The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” – Paul Coelho
“Traveling allows you to become so many different versions of yourself.” – Unknown
“Every morning you have two choices: Continue to sleep with your dreams, or wake up and chase them.” – Carmelo Anthony
“It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying to vainly assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there – with your eyes open – and lived to see it.” – Anthony Bourdain
“Step out of the history that is holding you back. Step into the new story you are willing to create.” – Oprah Winfrey
“I travel not to cross countries off a list, but to ignite passionate affairs with destinations.” – Nyssa P. Chopra
To get lost is to learn the way. – African proverb
“Ten years from now, make sure you can say that you chose your life, you didn’t settle for it.” – Mandy Hale
“Never surrender your hopes and dreams to the fateful limitations others have placed on their own lives.” – Anthon St. Maarten
“The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” – John Muir
“When exploring the continent, learn histories, learn names, speak to the people whose space you occupy.” – Jabulile Ngwenya
“I write, I travel, I eat, and I’m hungry for more.” – Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations
“It is pointless to embark on any journey if you do not believe yourself worthy of the destination.” – Anthon St. Maarten
“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” – Shirley MacLaine
“We are inundated with advice on where to travel to, but we hear little advice on why or how we should go.” – Alan de Botton, The Art of Travel
“I believe the world is incomprehensibly beautiful – an endless prospect of magic and wonder.” – Ansel Adams
“I will not be just a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent sources of joy and ecstacy.” – Anaïs Nin
“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Adventure should be part of everyone’s life. It is the whole difference between being fully alive and just existing.” – Holly Morris, Adventure Divas: Searching the Globe for Women Who Are Changing the World
Don’t listen to what they say. Go see. – Chinese proverb
“People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
“To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.” – Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
“The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped…” – Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads
“One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.” – Paul Coelho
“At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.” – Arthur Frommer
“[E]very traveler, no matter their race, will have a unique experience in any given country—some positive, and some negative. We will all interact with different immigration officers, different taxi drivers, different strangers on the street whom we may ask for directions. And all of those people that we meet will form an opinion based on our race, gender, height, weight, accent, clothing, and nationality, and that judgment will be based on a lifetime of their unique experiences. Just because someone else has had a negative encounter and shares that story doesn’t mean that another traveler will have the same bad experience. My advice, always: Do not allow someone else’s impressions to shape yours. All of us experience the world uniquely…” – Jessica Nabongo
“I am not born for one corner; the whole world is my native land.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
“There are some places in life where you can only go alone. Embrace the beauty of your solo journey.” – Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
“The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who’s going to stop me.” – Ayn Rand
“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African proverb
“If I have ever seen magic, it has been in Africa.” – John Hemingway
“Everything in Africa bites, but the safari bug is worst of all.” – Brian Jackman
Originally published 6 May 2019. Updated 10 January 2024 to add more travel quotes.
Photo credit: Featured image – Pascal-Laurent from Pixabay
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