Our favourite inspirational travel quotes have encouraged us to travel with abandon over the years. Perhaps they will do the same for you…
For us, there is no such thing as luxury travel; travel is, by default, a luxury. It is a privilege provided by the country of our birth, a privilege that many are not as fortunate to enjoy.
Sometimes, we have to pinch ourselves at just how ridiculous our lives have become: an ex-teacher and jobbing writer travelling the world for a living. It is absurd, it is astonishing, it is luxury.
When I first went travelling at 21 years old, my father gave me this quote scrawled on a piece of card.
It infused me with wanderlust. It encouraged me to get out of my comfort zone, make the most of my time, see the world and enjoy the freedom that comes with being on the road. It remains one of the most inspirational travel quotes I’ve read (even if Twain did not actually say it).
Today, 20 years and almost 100 countries later, it’s still in my wallet. Despite its tattered and dishevelled appearance, it’s every bit as important to me now as it was then.
With that in mind, we’ve collated our most beloved inspirational travel quotes to encourage readers to “explore, dream and discover” for themselves.
inspirational travel quotes
1. “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
2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
– St. Augustine
3. “Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage.”
– Paulo Coelho
4. “With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.”
– Sandra Lake
5. “When overseas you learn more about your own country, than you do the place you’re visiting.”
– Clint Borgen
6. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
– Mark Twain
7. “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.”
– Paul Brandt
8. “The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”
– Henry David Thoreau
9. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
– Rudyard Kipling
10. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
– Lao Tzu
11. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.”
– Susan Heller Anderson
12. “No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be.”
– Chuck Thompson
13. “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
14. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
– Lao Tzu
15. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.”
– Charles Dudley Warner
16. “A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.”
– John A. Shedd
17. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”
– Paul Theroux
18. “Not all those who wander are lost.”
– J. R. R. Tolkien
19. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
20. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”
– Benjamin Disraeli
21. “Once a year, go somewhere you’ve never been before.”
– The Dalai Lama
22. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
– Lin Yutang
23. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re travelling, 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
24. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
25. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
– Paul Theroux
26. “A traveller without observation is a bird without wings.”
– Moslih Eddin Saadi
27. “Your true traveller 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
28. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
– Henry Miller
29. “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
30. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”
– Anatole France
31. “I can’t control the wind but I can adjust the sail.”
– Ricky Skaggs
32. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.”
– Hilaire Belloc
33. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”
– Dagobert D. Runes
34. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.”
– James Michener
35. “The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
– Samuel Johnson
36. “You don’t have to be rich to travel well.”
– Eugene Fodor
37. “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
38. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
– Martin Buber
39. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.”
– Robert Frost
40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”
– Seneca
41. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort 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
42. “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
43. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
– Tim Cahill
44. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
– John Steinbeck
45. “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
46. “There are far, far better things ahead than we leave behind.”
– C.S. Lewis
47. “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
48. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
– Aldous Huxley
49. “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 traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.”
– Paul Fussell
50. “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
51. “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
52. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.”
– Elizabeth Drew
53. “People don’t take trips, trips take people.”
– John Steinbeck
54. “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
55. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
– Gustave Flaubert
56. “The journey not the arrival matters.”
– T. S. Eliot
57. “Time flies. It’s up to you to be the navigator.”
– Robert Orben
58. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
– Marcel Proust
59. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
– Oscar Wilde
60. “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
61. “If an ass goes travelling, he’ll not come home a horse.”
– Thomas Fuller
62. “Travelling tends to magnify all human emotions.”
– Peter Hoeg
63. “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
64. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
– Freya Stark
65. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine from the other side of the world.”
– Mary Anne Radmacher
66. “I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question.”
– Harun Yahya
67. “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.”
– George Bernard Shaw
68. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.”
– Carlo Goldoni
69. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
– Andre Gide
70 “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
– Ibn Battuta
71. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.”
– Anais Nin
72. “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
73. “The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.”
– Sir Richard Burton
74. “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
75. “He who would travel happily must travel light.”
– Antoine de St. Exupery
76. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
– Jack Kerouac
77. “The more I travelled the more I realised that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.”
– Shirley MacLaine
78. “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.”
– Stephen Covey
78. “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.”
– Lawrence Block
80. “Take only memories, leave only footprints.”
– Chief Seattle – or Si’ahl
81. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”
– Helen Keller
82. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
– Herman Melville
83. “We live in a 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
84. “The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself”
– Wallace Stevens
85. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”
– Neale Donald Walsch
86. “Paris is always a good idea.”
– Julia Ormond (although it is often wrongly attributed to Audrey Hepburn)
87. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the trip.”
– Babs Hoffman
88. “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
89. “Jobs fill your pocket but adventures fill your soul.”
– Jaime Lyn Beatty
90. “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
91. “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
92. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
– Mark Twain
93. “Live with no excuses and travel with no regrets.”
– Oscar Wilde
94. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.”
– Roy M Goodman
95. “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 harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
– Mark Twain (or possibly H Jackson Brown Jr)
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