Last Updated on 27th February 2024 by Sophie Nadeau
Wanderlust. It’s a word that we seemingly never hear the end of nowadays. Here are 100+ very of the very best travel quotes which will inspire your next adventure. So whether you’re looking for beautiful sayings or trying to caption your next holiday snap on social media, there’s no shortage of quotes about travel which are well worth remembering.
I have been a professional travel writer for almost a decade and am regularly in awe of new sights, experiences, and enjoy leaving the familiarity of normal every day routine and life behind.
However, even as a writer I am often stuck for words as to how travel feels, and this is when travel quotes come in. Because more often than not, someone has been able to describe the joys of travel better than I ever could. Below, I’ve listed over 100 of my favourite quotes about travel to help inspire your next trip…
If you are looking for something a bit more historic, then be sure to also check out my Shakespeare travel quotes. And if you want something from further afield, then check out these German travel words you’ll wish we had in English!
100+ Travel Quotes that will invoke wanderlust
#1 “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step” – Lao Tzu
#2 “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
#3 “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world” – Mary Anne Radmacher
#4 “There’s a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they’re absolutely free. Don’t miss so many of them” – Jo Walton
#5 “Remember that happiness is a way of travel, not a destination.” – Roy Goodman
#6 “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Saint Augustine
#7 “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” – Anonymous
#8 “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage” – Paulo Coelho
#9 “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
#10 “In the end, we only regret the chances we didn’t take” – Lewis Carroll (author of Alice in Wonderland)
#11 “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller” – Ibn Battuta
#12 “The most effective way to do it, is to do it.” – Amelia Earhart
#13 “Not all those who wander are lost.” – JRR Tolkien
#14 “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
#15 “Life is short, and the world is wide.” – Simon Raven
#16 “Oh the places you’ll go” – Dr. Seuss
#17 “We have nothing to lose and a world to see.” – Unknown
#18 “We don’t need objects; we need adventures.” – Unknown
#19 “I travel because I become uncomfortable being too comfortable.” – Carew Papritz
#20 “Leave nothing but footprints, take nothing but photos, kill nothing but time.” – Anonymous
#31 “Remember what Bilbo used to say: It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” – JRR Tolkien
#32 “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
#33 “Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
#34 “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
#35 “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon.
#36 “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
#37 “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by.” – Robert Lee Frost
#38 “You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.” – William Hazlitt
#39 “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.
#40 “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” – Stephen Covey
#41 “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore” – Andre Gide
#42 “Jobs fill your pockets, adventures fill your soul.” – Unknown
#43 “My goal is to run out of pages in my passport.” – Unknown
#44 “The goal is to die with memories not dreams.” – Unknown
#45 “Dare to live the life you’ve always wanted.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46 “Go where you feel most alive.” – Unknown
#47 “The soul of the journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.” – William Hazlitt
#48 “For always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known.” – Alfred Tennyson
#49 “If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is. You might never find out that you are useful for all the right reasons – and not all those stupid things that people tell you you’re useful for.” – Angelina Jolie
#50 “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow” – Anita Desai
#51 “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.” – Alain de Botton
#52 “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert David Runes
#53 “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.” – Martin Buber.
#54 “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.
#55 “Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
#56 “Own only what you can always carry with you: known languages, known countries, known people. Let your memory be your travel bag” – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
#57 “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
#58 “The gladdest moment in human life, me thinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton
#59 “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener
#60 “Jobs fill your pocket, but adventures fill your soul.” – Jamie Lyn Beatty
#61 “Travel. Your money will return. Your time won’t.” – Unknown
#62 “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.” – Erol Ozan
#63 “I love places that make you realise how tiny you and your problems are.” – Anonymous
#64 “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” – Ray Bradbury
#65 “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” – Frank Herbert
#66 “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
#67 “For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.” – Aldous Leonard Huxley
#68 “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
#69 “If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” – Rachel Wolchin
#70 “Have stories to tell not stuff to show.” – Anonymous
#71 “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut
#72 “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller
#73 “How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.” – Sarah Reijonen
#74 “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” – Henry David Thoreau
#75 “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
#76 “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, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese
#77 “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
#78 “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
#79 “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
#80 “A ship in a harbor is safe, but it not what ships are built for.” – John A. Shedd.
#81 “Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?” – Caroline Myss
#82 “Always take the scenic road.” – Unknown
#83 “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
#84 “Don’t let fear get in the way of the life you are meant to live.” – Anonymous
#85 “At the end of the day your feet should be dirty, your hair messy and your eyes sparkling.” – Shanti
#86 “I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels,” she once said. “Life’s a bitch. You’ve got to go out and kick a–.” – Maya Angelou
#87 “Of all the books in the world. The best stories are found between the pages of a passport.” – Unknown
#88 “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
#89 “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag
#90 “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” – Unknown
#91 “Surely of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.” – Freya Stark
#92 “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller
#93 “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau
#94 “Collect Moments, Not Things.” – Unknown
#95 “Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.” – Harriet Beecher Stowe
#96 “Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.” – Oscar Wilde
#97 “Adventures are the best way to learn.” – Unknown
#98 “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.” – Virginia Woolf
#99 “Just watch, all of you men. I’ll show you what a woman can do…I’ll go across the country, I’ll race to the Moon… I’ll never look back.” – Edna Gardner Whyte
#100 “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
#101 “Travel is the healthiest addiction.” – Anonymous
Photos of Travel quotes
If you’re more of a visual person, then below you’ll find some photos of travel quotes that will help inspire your next adventure.
Sophie Nadeau loves dogs, books, travel, pizza, and history. A Francophile at heart, she runs solosophie.com when she’s not chasing after the next sunset shot or consuming something sweet. She splits her time between Paris and London and travels as much as she can! Subscribe to Sophie’s YouTube Channel.