15 Mar 100 Inspirational Travel Quotes To Brighten Your Day
I have a love hate relationship with inspirational travel quotes. Sometimes I wonder why inspiration has given way to cliche.
Sometimes they make me all teary-eyed and uplifted, but there are days when I just want to roll my eyes and scream: “Enough!”
If you try to have a conversation about travel online you’ll notice certain travel quotes pop up on an hourly basis. You know the ones I mean.
The world is a book and those who don’t travel read only a page. Travelling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with these, I’ve decided to feature slightly lesser known inspirational travel quotes… and one hundred of them while I’m at it! Go big or go home, am I right?
If you follow me on Instagram (do it! do it!) you may have already read a few of these, but the majority are all as new to me as they will hopefully be to you.
Inspirational travel quotes
- “If I’d learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don’t talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.” -Alex Garland, The Beach
- “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
- “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” -Mary Anne Radmacher
- “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” -Gustave Flaubert
- “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. 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
- “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.” -Hilaire Belloc
- “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” -Susan Heller
- “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” -Aldous Huxley
- “When overseas you learn more about your own country, than you do the place you’re visiting.” -Clint Borgen
- “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” -Helen Keller
- “I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.” -Caskie Stinnett
- “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” -Neale Donald Walsch
- “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
- “But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excited a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only a rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” -Bill Bryson
- “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” -John A. Shedd
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust
- “The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” -G.K. Chesterton
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “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
- “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe. ” -Anatole France
- “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
- “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” -James Michener
- “Too often … I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.” -Louis L’Amour
- “I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself.” -James Baldwin
- “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it’s lethal.” -Paulo Coelho
- “While armchair travelers dream of going places, traveling armchairs dream of staying put.” -Anne Tyler
- “Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.” -Charles Kuralt
- “A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place….” -Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- “Adventure is worthwhile.” -Aristotle
- “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” -Lawrence Block
- “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” -Jack Kerouac
- “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
- “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” -Dagobert D. Runes
- “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
- “A traveller without observation is a bird without wings.” -Moslih Eddin Saadi
- “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
- “You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” -Miriam Adeney
- “May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.” -Edward Abbey
- “Traveling is not something you’re good at. It’s something you do. Like breathing.” -Gayle Forman
- “Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes — with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, bit it is always invigorating.” -Michael Crichton
- “Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage.” -Paulo Coelho
- “If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you are always in the same place.” -Nora Roberts
- “Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent.” -Margot Fonteyn
- “And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can’t go back to being normal; you can’t go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the unforgettable thread of wasted time.” -Donald Miller
- “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” -Lao Tzu
- “Hiking – I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains – not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.” -John Muir
- “I do not want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.” -Diane Ackerman
- “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” -Freya Stark
- “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” -Martin Buber
- “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” -Paul Theroux
- “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” -Charles Dudley Warner
- “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
- “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” -Benjamin Disraeli
- “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” -Elizabeth Drew
- “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” -Paul Theroux
- “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
- “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” -Rudyard Kipling
- “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” -Carlo Goldoni
- “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
- “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
- “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” -Kurt Vonnegut
- “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
- “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
- “He who is outside his door has the hardest part of his journey behind him.” -Dutch Proverb
- “…because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars…” -Jack Kerouac
- “I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” -Rosalia de Castro
- “He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.” -Sinclair Lewis
- “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.” -George Bernard Shaw
- “It had nothing to do with gear or footwear or the backpacking fads or philosophies of any particular era or even with getting from point A to point B. It had to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.” -Cheryl Strayed
- “A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse…and thinks of home.” -Carl Burns
- “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” -Pico Iyer
- “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” -John Steinbeck
- “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
- “I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth. Then I ask myself the same question.” -Harun Yahya
- “I was not born for one corner. The whole world is my native land.” -Seneca
- “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.” -Jawaharal Nehru
- “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
- “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
- “You lose sight of things… and when you travel, everything balances out.” -Daranna Gidel
- “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” -Tim Cahill
- “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
- “A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.” -Isabelle Eberhardt
- “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.” -Agnes Repplier
- “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
- “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” -Mahatma Gandhi
- “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.” -John Muir
- “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 experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way.” -Ralph Crawshaw
- “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
- “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.” -Glenn Clark
- “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” -Yogi Berra
- “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
- “There’s an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.” -Chuck Palahniuk
- “Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” -Pico Iyer
- “I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You’re going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It’s not what Tom Friedman writes about, I’m sorry. You’re going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking twelve miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people — Americans and Europeans — come back and go, ‘Ohhhh.’ And the lightbulb goes on.” -Henry Rollins
Did you like these inspirational travel quotes? Which one was your favourite? Are there any others you’d like to add?