I don’t know about you, but I love quotes. When I lost my old kindle 12 months ago with all my annotations & highlights, it almost felt like losing a family member. But more than that – whenever I see a lovely quote, I note it down in my diary. So I decided it was about time to compile a list of my all time favorite travel quotes. But better put your credit card somewhere safe before you read on – least you book a flight straight away! ;-)
Travel Quotes: My 100 favorites
1. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. then take half the clothes and twice the money.” ― Susan Heller
2. “For once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been, and there you will long to return.” ― Leonardo da Vinci
3. “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” ― Dalai Lama
4. “The most important part of luggage is a cheerful heart.” ―Hermann Löns
5. “You don’t have to travel the world to understand that the sky is blue around the world.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
6. A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes
7. “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” ― Anonymous
8. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” ― Seneca
9. “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” ― John A. Shedd
10. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” ― Mark Twain
11. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” ― Aldous Huxley
12. “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” — Lawrence Block
13. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey.” ― Babs Hoffman
14. “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” ― Shirley MacLaine
15. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” ― Mark Twain
16. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
17. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” ― John Steinbeck
18. “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
19. “Life isn’t about the number of breaths you take. It’s the moments that take your breath away.” ― Vicki Corona
20. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” ― David Mitchell
21. “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
22. “I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.” ― David Rockefeller
23. “Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.” ― Ray Bradbury
24. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” ― Andre Gide
25. “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” ― Tom Stoppard
26. “Travel is very subjective. What one person loves, another loathes.” ― Robin Leach
27. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” ― Saint Augustine
28. “A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.” ― Henry Rollins
29. “You can’t control the past, but you can control where you go next.” ― Kirsten Hubbard
30. “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it’s lethal.” – Paulo Coelho
31. “Only he that has traveled the road knows where the holes are deep.” ― Chinese Proverb
32. “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
33. “He who is outside his door has the hardest part of his journey behind him.” ― Dutch Proverb
34. “Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone’s home and backyard.” ― Vera Nazarian
35. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” ― Susan Sontag
36. “One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.” ― William Feather
37. “The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” ― Oprah Winfrey
38. “You’ll never know unless you go.” ― Rob Lloyd
39. “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.” ― Cesare Pavese
40. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” ― Paul Theroux
41. “Jobs fill your pocket, adventures fill your soul.” ― Jaime Lyn Beatty
42. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
43. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” ― Lao Tzu
44. “The journey not the arrival matters.” ― T. S. Eliot
45. “All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.” ― J. R. R. Tolkien
46. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”. ― Anatole France
47. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” ― Moorish proverb
48. “When a man is a Traveler, the world is his house and the sky is his roof, where he hangs his hat is his home, and all the people are his family.” ― Drew Bundini Brown
49. “He who would travel happily must travel light.”― Antoine de Saint Exupéry
50. “People don’t take trips – trips take people.” ― John Steinbeck
51. “The road is there, it will always be there. You just have to decide when to take it.” ― Chris Humphrey
52. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” ― Mary Anne Radmacher
53. “Travel is like a giant blank canvas, and the painting on the canvas is only limited by one’s imagination.” ― Ross Morley
54. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” ― Herman Melville
55. “Travel is like knowledge, the more you see, the more you know you haven’t seen.” ― Mark Hertsgaad
56. “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” ― Ibn Battuta
57. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” ― Henry Miller
58. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ― Gustave Flaubert
59. “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” — Mae West
60. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” ― Dagobert D. Runes
61. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” ― Ling Yutang
62. “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
63. “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.” ― Erol Ozan
64. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” ― G. K. Chesterton
65. “You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” ― Christopher Columbus
66. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” ― Roy M. Goodman
67. Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” ― Frank Herbert
68. “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
69. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” ― Miriam Beard
70. “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
71. “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
72. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” ― Tim Cahill
73. “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
74. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” ― Marcel Proust
75. “Travel brings power and love back to your life.” ― Rumi
76. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we will find it not.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
77. “Some men see things as they are and say why; I dream things that never were and say why not?” ― George Bernard Shaw
78. “Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.” ― Jack Kerouac
79. “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
80. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ernest Hemingway
81. “Take only memories, leave only footprints.” ― Chief Seattle
82. “To travel is to live.” ― Hans Christian Andersen
83. “A man of ordinary talent will alway 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
84. “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves” ― Henry David Thoreau
85. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” ― David Mitchell
86. “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” ― Oscar Wilde
87. “There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.” ― Albert Einstein
88. “The world is big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” ― John Muir
89. “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes your richer.” ― Unknown
90. “Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.” ― Thomas Fuller
91. “You can’t see the whole sky through a bamboo tube.” ― Japanese saying
92. “No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be.” ― Chuck Thompson
93. “You don’t have to be rich to travel well.” ― Eugene Fodor
94. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” ― Helen Keller
95. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes
96. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” ― Neale Donald Walsch
97. “Investment in travel is an investment in yourself.” ― Matthew Karsten
98. “Some people live more in twenty years than others do in forty. It’s not the time, it’s the person.” ― Doctor Who
99. “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” ― Judith Thurman
100. “People who don’t travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what’s in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.” – Martin Yan
Bonus travel quotes
“A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.” ― Émile Genest
“No matter where you go, there you are.” ― Buckaroo Banzi
“You don’t choose the day you enter the world and you don’t choose the day you leave. It’s what you do in between that makes all the difference.” ― Anita Septimus
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” ― Lewis Carroll
“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have traveled. “ ― Mohammed
“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
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” ― Robert Frost
“Travel is the best, yes, the only cure for grief.” ― Alfred de Musset
So that’s it. That was my list of my favorite travel quotes. Would you like to add one? Tell me in the comments below. And don’t forget to pin this for later!
Picture credit: Jean-Marie Hullot
