Travel rewards and fulfills our lives in ways that few other things can match. It opens doors to new experiences, cultures, and perspectives, leaving us changed. What better way to capture the essence of travel than through the timeless power of words?
Over the years, I have filled travel journals and notebooks with quotes that I’ve found to be inspirational. Below, I share some of my favorite quotes about travel and adventure that might just prompt you to plan your next trip.
This list has quotes from famous authors, adventurers, notable celebrities, spiritual leaders, proverbs and people who aren’t famous but once said something memorable! If you have a favorite that’s not on the list, be sure to drop a comment at the bottom of the article.
“Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
“To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Andersen
“Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.” – Anthony Bourdain
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta
“Travel…the best way to be lost and found at the same time.” – Brenna Smith
“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.” – Anais Nin
“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton
“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
“Adventure is worthwhile.” – Aesop
“No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be.” – Chuck Thompson
“We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” – Hilaire Belloc
“He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de St. Exupery
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” – Henry David Thoreau
“To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark
“Traveling is not something you’re good at. It’s something you do, like breathing.” – Gayle Foreman
“The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” – Anna Quindlen
“I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.” – John Green
“I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find a perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.” – Anthony Bourdain
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain
“Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – Andre Gide
“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination with reality, and instead of thinking of how things may be, see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson
“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca
“With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.” – Sandra Lake
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Saint Augustine
“Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.” – David McCullough
“Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” – Anonymous
“Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times.” – Asian Proverb
“Work, save, travel, repeat.” – Anonymous
“As you move through this life and this world, you change things slightly; you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life–and travel–leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks–on your body or on your heart–are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.” – Anthony Bourdain
“You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.” – Paul Theroux
“We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” – Anonymous
“Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.” – Peter Hoeg
“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
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener
“You don’t have to be rich to travel well.” – Eugene Fodor
“When overseas you learn more about your own country than you do the place you’re visiting.” – Clint Borgen
“People don’t take trips, trips take people.” – John Steinbeck
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“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
“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.” – Hemmingway
“Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage.” – Paulo Coelho
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller
“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” – Neale Donald Walsch
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.” – Irving Wallace
“Jobs fill your pocket but adventures fill your soul.” – Jamie Lyn Beatty
“I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.” – Caskie Stinnett
“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” – Shirley MacLaine
“Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” – Anonymous
“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman
“Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the trip.” – Babs Hoffman
“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
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag
“Take only memories, leave only footprints.” – Chief Seattle
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost
“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner
“Oh, the places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
“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
“Drive heavily with locals whenever possible.” – Anthony Bourdain
“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” – Lawrence Block
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
“Life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.” – Simon Raven
“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
“Travel makes a wise man better but a fool worse.” – Thomas Fuller
“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller
“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. Walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food. It’s a plus for everybody.” – Anthony Bourdain
“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
“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” – David Mitchell
“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in an office or mowing your lawn. Climb that damn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac
“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
“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” – Anita Desai
“We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.” – Ray Bradbury
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
“It’s better to travel well than to arrive.” – Buddha
Lance Longwell is a travel writer and photographer who has published Travel Addicts since 2008, making it one of the oldest travel blogs. He is a life-long traveler, having visited all 50 of the United States by the time he graduated high school. Lance has continued his adventures by visiting 70 countries on 5 continents – all in search of the world’s perfect sausage. He’s a passionate foodie and enjoys hot springs and cultural oddities. When he’s not traveling (or writing about travel), you’ll find him photographing his hometown of Philadelphia.
