I used to think all quotes were cliché. People would always mention them like overused pieces of advice to throw their wisdom at people. The thing is, all the quotes you keep hearing over and over don’t resonate with you. You need to find phrases that will inspire your heart and motivate your mind. You have to keep the ones that you can relate to and discard the ones you disagree with. Now I use quotes as an inspiring way to tell someone to follow their dreams.
As cliché as it sounds, life is short. Even if you always say that you want to travel, time gradually creeps up on you. So I hope that my favorite travel quotes will make you want to travel today because now is the time to pursue your travel goals.
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Those quotes will show you that travel changes you. Not always in the way you would imagine. Travel can be uncertain, even lonely. But overall travel experiences are unlike anything else. Because travel has the power to transform your life
All of those quotes (more than 150!) are also perfect for Instagram captions so do not hesitate to get some inspiration with those travel quotes for Instagram!
Famous Travel Quotes
1. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” ― Marcel Proust
2. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” ― Susan Sontag
3. “He who must travel happily must travel light.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupery
4. “Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures.” ― Lewis Carroll
5. “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it is lethal.” ― Paulo Coelho
6. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ― 老子 (Laozi)
7. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” ― Henry Miller
8. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled.” ― Mohammed
9. “Take only memories, leave only footprints.” ― Chief Si’ahl
10. “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.” ― William Blake
11. “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” ― Dr. Seuss
12. “Not all those who wander are lost.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
13. “It is better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.”― Asian Proverb
14. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ― Gustave Flaubert
15. “Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.” ― Oscar Wilde
16. “Jobs fill your pocket. Adventures fill your soul.” ― Jaime Lyn Beatty
17. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” ― André Gide
18. “I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.” ― John Green
19. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” ― Roy M. Goodman
20. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” ― Aldous Huxley
Travel Quotes That Will Fuel Your Wanderlust
21. “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.” ― Tennesse Williams
22. “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
23. “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
24. “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. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” ― Anthony Bourdain
25. “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” ― Anthony Bourdain
26. “Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.” ― Anthony Bourdain
27. “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” ― Christopher McCandless
28. “Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.” ― Amin Maalouf
29. “To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert
30. “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” ― Frank Herbert
31. “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
32. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.” — Freya Stark
33. “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
34. “Travel brings power and love back into your life.” ― Rumi
35. “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
36. “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 safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr.
37. “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
38. “Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.” ― Jeniffer Lee
39. “Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.” ― Walt Whitma
40. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” — Muriel Strode
41. “Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure.” ― Maya Angelou
42. “The universe is a sort of book, whose first page one has read when one has seen only one’s own country.” — Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron
43. “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 one’s lifetime.” — Mark Twain
44. “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
45. “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
Brutally Honest Travel Quotes
46. “It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same.” ― Sarah Turnbull
47. “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
48. “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” ― Pascal Mercier
49. “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
50. “The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.” ― Paul Theroux
51. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” ― Paul Theroux
52. “The farther you go, however, the harder it is to return. The world has many edges, and it’s easy to fall off.” ― Anderson Cooper
53. “The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.” ― Rolf Potts
54. “Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we’d probably learn twice as much.” ― Lucy R. Lippard
55. “When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.” ― Catherynne M. Valente
56. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” ― Samuel Johnson
57. “Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else – arrange everything before-hand?” ― Richard Aldington
58. “All this hurrying from place to place won’t bring you any relief, for you’re traveling in the company of your own emotions, followed by your troubles all the way.” ― Seneca
59. “I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” ― Hilaire Belloc
60. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” ― Elizabeth Drew
61. “It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the mélancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.” ― Gustave Flaubert
62. “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
63. “I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find 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
64. “It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough – to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.” ― Anthony Bourdain
65. “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
66. “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
67. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” ― Dagobert D. Runes
68. “People don’t take trips—trips take people.” ― John Steinbeck
69. “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
70. “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
71. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ” ― Lin Yutang
72. “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
73. “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
74. “Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.” ― Rashedur Ryan Rahman
75. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” ― Paul Fussell
76. “Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.” ― Thomas Fuller
77. “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
78. “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
79. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” ― James A. Michener
80. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
81. “The trouble is, you think you have time.” ― Jack Kornfield
82. “Adventure rewrites the routine of our lives and wakes us sharply from the comforts of the familiar. It allows us to see how vast the expanse of our experience. Our ability to grow is no longer linear but becomes unrestricted to any direction we wish to run.” ― Josh Gates
83. “You can’t control the past, but you can control where you go next.” ― Kirsten Hubbard
84. “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
85. “A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” ― Moslih Eddin Saadi
Motivational Journey Quotes
86. “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.” ― Alain de Botton
87. “Travellers understand, instinctively and by experience, that travel and adventure change and elongate time, even while navigating the deadlines of airline and train departures.” ― Paul Sheehan
88. “A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.” ― Ryszard Kapuściński
89. “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
90. “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
91. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.” ― Anatole France
92. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey! ” ― Barbara Hoffman
93. “Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.” ― Ray Bradbury
94. “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” ― 老子 (Laozi)
95. “The journey is part of the experience – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.” ― Anthony Bourdain
96. “Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.” ― Ma Jian
97. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” ― John Steinbeck
98. “Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.” ― Nicolas Bouvier
99. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
100. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
101. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.” ― Anais Nin
102. “The most important reason for going from one place to another is to see what’s in between, and they took great pleasure in doing just that.” ― Norton Juster
103. “Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.” ― Greg Anderson
104. “I love to travel, but hate to arrive.” ― Albert Einstein
105. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” ― Jack Kerouac
106. “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
107. “It is not the destination where you end up but the mishaps and memories you create along the way!” ― Penelope Riley
108. “For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.” ― Michelle Obama
109. “You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.” ― Joss Whedon
110. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” ― Martin Buber
Tourists vs Travellers Quotes
111. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travellers don’t know where they’re going.” ― Paul Theroux
112. “Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.” ― Rick Warren
113. “Tourists went on holidays while travelers did something else. They traveled.” ― Alex Garland
114. “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” ― Lawrence Block
115. “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” ― G.K. Chesterton
116. “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
117. “Anyone who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveler” ― Ira Levin
118. “Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.” ― Tahir Shah
119. “A tourist can’t help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.” ― Michael Lewis
120. “It makes a difference how you feel on this planet Earth: a citizen, a temporary tourist, or an exotic cast-away.” ― Talismanist Giebra
Inspirational Quotes About Travelling the World
121. “A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
122. “I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.” ― Paulo Coelho
123. “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
124. “Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.” ― Freya Stark
125. “The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” ― Henry David Thoreau
126. “Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.” ― Jodi Picoult
127. “Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” ― Neil Gaiman
128. “There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.” ― Charlotte Eriksson
129. “No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be.” ― Chuck Thompson
130. “I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.” ― Roman Payne
131. “I travel a lot. I hate having my life disrupted by routine.” ― Caskie Stinnett
132. “Traveling is not something you’re good at. It’s something you do. Like breathing.” ― Gayle Foreman
133. “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 where riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and to fall in love once more.” ― Pico Iyer
134. “It is not down on any map; true places never are.” ― Herman Melville
135. “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
136. “Travel teaches toleration.” ― Benjamin Disraeli
137. “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
138. “Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.” ― Benjamin Disraeli
139. “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
140. “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
141. “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” ― Mary Anne Radmacher
142. “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.” ― Glenn Clark
143. “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. ” ― Agnes Repplier
144. “Maps encourage boldness. They’re like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible.” ― Mark Jenkins
145. “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.” ― Erol Ozan
146. “Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.” ― Lovelle Drachman
147. “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” ― Mae West
148. “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
149. “Being exposed to the existence of other languages increases the perception that the world is populated by people who not only speak differently from oneself but whose cultures and philosophies are other than one’s own.” ― Maya Angelou
150. ”Don’t let your luggage define your travels, each life unravels differently.” ― Shane L. Koyczan
My Favorite Travel Quotes
151. “Travel empties out everything you’ve into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are.” ― Claire Fontaine
152. “Traveling is more than having a destination in mind; it’s discovering a place in your heart.” ― Mark Amend
153. “Travel sparks our imagination, feeds our curiosity, and reminds us how much we all have in common.” ― Deborah Lloyd
154. “And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, 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
155. “Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’” ― Lisa St. Aubin de Teran
156. “Travel is like knowledge. The more you see, the more you know you haven’t seen.” ― Mark Hertsgaard
157. “Wanderlust is incurable.” ― Mark Jenkins
158. “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
159. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” ― Tim Cahill
160. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” ― Anita Desai
I truly hope these travel quotes have given you some inspiration to travel and explore the world. Do you have any favorite quotes? What about travel quotes? Share with me your favorites in the comments down below!
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