It’s hard to put into words just how transformational travel can be. Thankfully, artists, authors, philosophers, and world travellers have captured the essence with inspirational travel quotes that remind us of our past journeys and serve as fuel for future trips.
We’ve rounded up some of the best travel quotes from the likes of Anthony Bourdain, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other literary greats to help you get excited about your next big adventure. These beautiful quotes also make great travel captions for Instagram, so add them to your next post to encourage your followers to get out and see the world.
Inspirational travel quotes
“Once a year go somewhere you have never been before.” — Dalai Lama
“You lose sight of things … and when you travel, everything balances out.” — Daranna Gidel
“A traveller without observation is a bird without wings.” — Moslih Eddin Saadi
“When overseas, you learn more about your own country than you do the place you’re visiting.” — Clint Borgen
“It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realise the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realise how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.” — Anthony Bourdain
“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” — Mary Ritter Beard
“Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.” — John Muir
“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” — Andre Gide
“No one realises how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” — Lin Yutang
“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” — Henry David Thoreau
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” — Gustave Flaubert
“A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” — John A. Shedd
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” — St. Augustine
“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.” — Jawaharlal Nehru
“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
“You need not even listen, just wait … the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.” — Franz Kafka
Related Stories
Quotes that make perfect travel captions for Instagram
“Life is an adventure, it’s not a package tour.” — Eckhart Tolle
“The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” — Oprah Winfrey
“Robert Frost was right. To take the ‘road less travelled by’ does make all the difference.” — Samantha Brown
“Travel changes you. 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.” — Anthony Bourdain
“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” — Michael Altshuler
“A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.” — Henry Rollins
“Not all those who wander are lost.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
“People don’t take trips, trips take people.” — John Steinbeck
“We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” — Hilaire Belloc
“Jobs fill your pocket, adventures fill your soul.” — Jamie Lyn Beatty
“Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.” — Lovelle Drachman
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” — Lao Tzu
“I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.” — Melody Truong
“As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen.” — A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” — Neale Donald Walsch
Related Stories
Best travel quotes about the journey
“I don’t know where I am going, but I’m on my way.” — Carl Sagan
“Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.” — Ray Bradbury
“Travel and change of place impart new vigour to the mind.” — Seneca
“Just to travel is rather boring, but to travel with a purpose is educational and exciting.” — Sargent Shriver
“Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints.” — Chief Seattle
“There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” — Orson Welles
“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” — Lao Tzu
“An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” — Gilbert K. Chesterton
“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travellers don’t know where they’re going.” — Paul Theroux
“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” — David Mitchell
“The journey not the arrival matters.” — T.S. Eliot
“If it scares you, it may be a good thing to try.” — Seth Godin
“Travel is like an endless university. You never stop learning.” — Harvey Lloyd
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
“The more I travelled the more I realised that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” — Shirley MacLaine
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” — Henry Miller
“Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the trip.” — Babs Hoffman
“One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are.” — Edith Wharton
Best quotes to inspire wanderlust
“The Wanderlust has got me … by the belly-aching fire.” — Robert W. Service
“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 harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain
“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
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” — Anaïs Nin
“For always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known.” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” — Helen Keller
“Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.” — Oscar Wilde
“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
“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
“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
“Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.” — Paul Brandt
“It is in our nature to explore, to reach out into the unknown. The only true failure would be not to explore at all.” — Sir Ernest Shackleton
Best travel quotes for after your trip
“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” — Anita Desai
“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 real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” — Jack Kerouac
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Now more than ever do I realise 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
“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” — Mary Anne Radmacher
“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It’s lethal.” — Paulo Coelho
“Travelling — it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” — Ibn Buttuta
“A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.” — Tim Cahill
“With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.” — Sandra Lake
“Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” — Benjamin Disraeli
Fact checked by Elizabeth MacLennan
(Feature Image Credit: Vashishtha Jogi)
This story first appeared on travelandleisure.com
Related: Literary Caverns: 12 Famous Authors’ Homes That You Can Visit
The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
Written By
Elizabeth Rhodes
