50 Ultimate Travel Quotations To Inspire Your Journey

I confess I am a travel quote junkie. For some it might be salt and pepper shakers or precious coins that are gathered like treasure. My collections are adored pages of travel words. Travel quotations, like seeds in the garden, blossom travel ideas in my brain like a prolific garden. Or like a weed patch depending on who you ask.

Below are fifty travel quotations that will inspire wanderlust. You could argue some are more like travel paragraphs but none the less inspiring, albeit lengthy, travel quotes.

An intense craving for travel and adventure may ensue. May your journey be full of unexpected discoveries. May you return home with new eyes to the world, a heart open to endless travel possibilities and a pocket full of travel quotes of your own.

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50 Best Travel Quotations to Induce Wanderlust

“I haven’t been everywhere but it’s on my list.”  ~ Susan Sontag

“A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such speed….It feels an impulsion…this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know too when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizon.”  ~ Richard Bach

“Fill your life with adventures not things. Have stories to tell not things to show. ~ Unknown

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”  ~ Mark Twain

“Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.”  ~ Unknown

Machu Picchu Peru

“I like animals. I like natural history. The travel bit is not the important bit. The travel bit is what you have to do in order to go and look at animals.”  ~ David Attenborough

“It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”  ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

“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

“ Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”  ~ Jack Kerouac

“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

Neuschwanstein Castle Germany

“Not all those who wander are lost.”  ~ J.R.R. Tolkein

“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

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”  ~ Lao Tzu

“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

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”  ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

Cliffs of Moher Ireland

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”  ~ Marcel Proust

“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

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”  ~ Augustine of Hippo

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”  ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”  ~ Isabelle Eberhart

Tuscany Italy

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”  ~ G.K. Chesterton

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”  ~ Gustave Flaubert

“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 excites 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 the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”  ~ Bill Bryson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”  ~ Henry Miller

“Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.”  ~ Ma Jian

Lake Louise Canada

“Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.”  ~ Erol Ozan

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”  ~ James A. Michener

“See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.” ~ Ray Bradbury

“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 Erkisson

“It’s hard to go. It’s scary and lonely…and half the time you’ll be wondering why the hell you’re in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires.

But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.”  ~ Cheryl Strayed

Victoria Falls  Zimbabwe

“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”  ~ Kahlil Gibran

“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

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”  ~ Tennessee Williams

“I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”  ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

“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

Boulder Beach South Africa

“How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.”  ~ Sarah Reijonen

“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

“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

“Personally I like going places where I don’t speak the language, don’t know anybody, don’t know my way around and don’t have any delusions that I’m in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.”  ~ Michael Mewshaw

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.”  ~ Anthony Doerr

Mount Norquay Banff Canada

“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

“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.”  ~ Cesare Pavese

“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. ”  ~ Tim Cahill

“The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have. ”  ~ Anna Quidlen

“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

Angkor Wat Cambodia

“I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”  ~ Mary Anne Radmacher

“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

“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”  ~ Anthony Bourdain

“It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.”  ~ Gustave Flaubert

“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

Sydney Australia

Do you have a travel quotation that has inspired you to take to the open road?