While some inspirational quotes can be cliché and cheesy, others can provide little moments of clarity revealing truths, fears, and sometimes undiscovered aspirations.
12 years ago, I began writing down quotes that resonate with me, challenge my thought process, and inspire self-reflection. The process of writing these words down on paper, allow me to better process and appreciate the intention of the message.
I would like to share with you some of the best travel quotes which I have collected throughout the years. Please feel free to pin, tweet, and share on your own social media so that together we can spread the message of travel, wonder, and adventure.
Best Inspirational Travel Quotes
1. “The core of man’s spirit comes from new experiences.”
2. “Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day; its what you do with them that counts.”
3. “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” – Spencer Johnson
4. “Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.” – Anthony Doerr
5. “Travel…the best way to be lost and found at the same time.” – Brenna Smith
6. “If we hope to live not just moment to moment, but in true consciousness of our existence, then our greatest need and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in our lives.” – Thomas J. Peters, “In Search of Excellence“
7. “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.”― Mark Twain
8. “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
9. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.“ – Robert Frost
10. “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 Monk and the Riddle”
11. “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“
12. “The world will change whether or not you choose to change it, but you have the power to choose its direction.” – Napoleon Hill
14. “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
13. “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
15. “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”
16. “A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” – Pico Iyer
17. “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
18. “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.” – Secret Life of Walter Mitty
19. “With the right mindset and spirit, only the sky is the limit.”
20. “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
21. “You will never be completely at home again because part of your heart will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” – Miriam Adeney
22. “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G.K. Chesterton
23. “Wherever you go, go with all your heart!” – Confucius
24. “Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.” – Irving Wallace
25. “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” – Paolo Coelho
26. “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing the lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac
27. “You have not traveled enough,” she said. “Or you’d know that every journey makes its own map across your heart.” ― Sharon Shinn, Mystic and Rider
28. “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” -Stephen Covey
29. “Own only what you can always carry with you: known languages, known countries, known people. Let your memory be your travel bag” -Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
30. “Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.” – Gaby Basora
31. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark
32. “I tramp a perpetual journey.” ― Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
33. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comforts 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
34. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” ― Marcel Proust
35. “Travel doesn’t become adventure until you leave yourself behind.” ― Marty Rubin
36. “The less I needed the better I felt” – Charles Bukowski
37.“Anticipation. In love and travel, getting there is half the fun. The lustful impatience, the passionate daydreams, the nerve-wracking waiting… lovers and travelers are all alike when they find themselves on the brink of a new adventure.” ― Vivian Swift, Le Road Trip: A Traveler’s Journal of Love and France
38. “Take every chance you get in life, because some things only happen once.” – Karen Gibbs
39. “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
40. “Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” – Amelia Earhart
41. “Every hundred feet the world changes.” – Roberto Bolaño
42. “Oh, the places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
43. “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.” – Oscar Wilde
44. “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, Wow! What a ride! “– Hunter S Thompson
45. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard
46. “Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret” – Oscar Wilde
47. “What one learns in a classroom is just a very small part of learning process. The real learning starts when one crosses borders and travels miles for the real knowledge.” ― Vivek Sahni
48. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
49. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” — Neale Donald Walsch
50. “I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. You live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen non percent of.” – Louis C.K.
51. “Blessed are the curious for they will have adventures.”
52. “Sometimes, you find yourself in the middle of nowhere, and sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, you find yourself.” – Unknown
53. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
54. “Take only memories, leave only footprints.” – Chief Seattle
55. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” – Anaïs Nin
56. “The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.”
57. “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
58. “People do not decide to become extraordinary. They decide to accomplish extraordinary things.” –Edmund Hillary
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Oh I love good travel quotes. I always use them for my Instagram captions. Some of them I didn’t know yet and I will bookmark them for my next posts.
Glad that I could provide some new ones 🙂
I really, really, really love to travel – I’d do it all the time if I could! Your travel quotes are inspiring and wonderful. I especially love those from Mark Twain. He was so brilliant and so succinct.
I love these quotes, especially as there are a few there I’ve never read before. The one from Anthony Bourdain always moves me, as it’s poetic as it is true. I’m aiming to create my own quote one day, and who knows, make it into a list like this one!
While all these quotes are amazing, the one by Mark Twain – Explore, Dream, Discover is a classic. It is even my desktop image, both in office, at home and even on my mobile. Although not so famous, I also like the one about the fact that everyone has 24 hrs in the day and how they spend them is what matters!
The one about 24 hours in a day is one of my favorites. It is kind of a wake-up call to stop making excuses and do something with my life. There is nothing stopping me from accomplishing all that I want to do in life…except self-imposed excuses.
I have read so many travel quotes posts which are just shuffled clones of each other. But your list is quite unique and many of these quotes are ones I have never heard of before. The one by P8co Iyer resonates a lot with me.
Thanks so much! I feel the same way when I see alot of those lists online. I wanted to provide a list of some of the more popular as well as some of the lesser known quotes, but mostly I just wanted to provide a list which I found most impactful. Many of those which I posted actually came from non-travel related books which I have read throughout the years.
A compilation of best travel quotes. My favorite one is by Mark Twain. I guess that’s why he could wrote world’s best sellers. And it’s so true what Anthony Bourdain said about traveling. I read or heard #2 somewhere before, which is why some people who chose to travel near and far are enjoying their lives while others stuck with work and busyness to impress their peers. lol.
So glad you enjoyed our compilation and hope that it continues to inspire your wanderlust 🙂
Yes yes yes! I am absolutely loving these especially “A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation” – it is so true. Many people think always traveling is because I want to “escape” or am addicted to “movement” – but travel is so much more than this. With every experience had whilst travelling, you are moved, you are changed, you learn, you meet new people…essentially you are transformed!
Well said! When you leave on a journey and return, you are rarely one in the same. With the new sights and experiences, it is difficult not to grow and transform.
I keep a list of travel quotes to keep me motivated. They are so inspiring, and I loved going through each and every of them that you have listed here. I loved this one particularly by Napoleon Hill “The world will change whether or not you choose to change it, but you have the power to choose its direction.” I must say this a lovely collection of travel quotes. Thanks for the share.
That is one of my favorites too. Having a good list of travel quotes handy is always a good resource for motivation and keeping the wanderlust alive 🙂
My favorite would be . “Travel…the best way to be lost and found at the same time.” It is so so true for every minute I find something new, I get lost in it 🙂 A lovely collection of quotes. Bookmarking this for some inspiration later.
“The world will change whether or not you choose to change it, but you have the power to choose its direction.” This one is my favorite
It is a powerful quote and a good reminder of how we live our life.