152 Best Travel Quotes To Inspire You To See The World (2024)

We’ve been putting together some of our favorite inspirational travel quotes as we continue to travel the world and experience new places and things abroad.

What follows is a complete collection of 152 of the best travel quotes, complete with adventure travel quotes from famous figures like Anthony Bourdain, John Muir, and Mark Twain.

Warning: some of these quotes may give you the travel itch! In any case, I hope you’ll find some of these short travel quotes inspirational for your own journey!

Table of Contents show

152 Best Travel Quotes

• Famous Travel Quotes

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. — Unknown

Take only memories, leave only footprints. — Unknown

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

Not all those who wander are lost. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Every man dies, but not every man really lives. — William Wallace

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. — Oscar Wilde

Life is a journey. Make the most of it. — Unknown

I’ve traveled every road in this here land… I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been everywhere. — Johnny Cash

Paris is always a good idea. — Audrey Hepburn

Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer. — Unknown

Collect moments, not things. — Unknown

Today is your day, your mountain is waiting. So get on your way. — Dr Seuss

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. — Unknown

I’m shaking the dust of this crummy little town off my feet and I’m gonna see the world. — George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life

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. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home. — Gary Snyder

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. — Lao Tzu

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. — John Muir

The mountains are calling and I must go. — John Muir

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves. — John Muir

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

Oh the places you’ll go. — Dr. Seuss

I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. — Robert Frost

When one is alone at night in the depths of the woods, the stillness is at once awful and sublime. — John Muir

Nature gives to every time and season some beauties of its own. — Charles Dickens

• Mark Twain Travel Quotes

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.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else — these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Lifetimes of ecstasy crowded into a single moment.

It is the loveliest fleet of islands [Hawaii] that lies anchored in any ocean.

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one [Hawaii], no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides; other things change, but it remains the same.

For me the balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of its surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the spirit of its wildland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

• Funny Travel Quotes

Airplanes may kill you, but they ain’t likely to hurt you. — Leroy Satchel Paige

Two great talkers will not travel far together. — George Borrow

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

I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine. — Caskie Stinnett

Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone? — Erma Bombeck

Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. — Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz

• Short Travel Quotes

Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before. — Unknown

Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times. — Asian Proverb

Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. — Ibn Battutah

We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us. — Unknown

One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm. — Ella Maillart

Half the fun of travel is the esthetic of lostness. — Ray Bradbury

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

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. — Neale Donald Walsh

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. — Unknown

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world. — Louis Armstrong

They say travel broadens the mind, but you must have the mind. — G.K. Chesterton

Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow. — Anita Desai

Life is short and the world is wide. — Unknown

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

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

If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere. — Vincent van Gogh

The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness. — John Muir

A wise traveler never despises his own country. — Carlos Osvaldo Goldoni

You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world. — William Hazlitt

I love to travel, but hate to arrive. — Albert Einstein

And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul. — John Muir

A great way to learn about your country is to leave it. — Henry Rollins

Live your life by a compass, not a clock. — Stephen Covey

Some experiences simply do not translate, you have to go to know. — Kobi Yamada

I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world. — Mary Anne Radmacher

At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding. — Arthur Frommer

Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage. — Paulo Coelho

Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost. — Erol Ozan

Travel far enough, you meet yourself. — David Mitchell

The journey itself is my home. — Matsuo Basho

Live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry. — Jack Kerouac

The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. — Guillermo del Toro

A good traveler leaves no tracks. — Lao Tzu

It’s in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the Earth people who make you feel right at home. — Aaron Lauritsen

It is better to travel well than to arrive. — Unknown

The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. — Agnes Repplier

• Misc Travel Quotes

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. — Albert Camus

To the lover of wilderness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world. — John Muir

When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty. — John Muir

I’m in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection. But with Montana, it is love. — John Steinbeck

Yosemite Park is a place of rest, a refuge from the roar and dust and weary, nervous, wasting work of the lowlands, in which one gains the advantages of both solitude and society. — John Muir

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. — Jacques Cousteau

The Mediterranean has the color of mackerel, changeable I mean. You don’t always know if it is green or violet, you can’t even say it’s blue, because the next moment the changing reflection has taken on a tint of rose or gray. — Vincent van Gogh

I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order. — John Burroughs

No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God’s beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. — John Muir

On earth there is no heaven, but there are pieces of it. — Jules Renard

Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better. — Albert Einstein

Lighthouses are not just stone, brick, metal, and glass. There’s a human story at every lighthouse. — Elinor DeWire

To almost every man and woman there is something about a lighted beacon which suggests hope and trust and appeals to the better instincts of all mankind. — Edward Rowe Snowe

• Inspirational Travel Quotes

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. — Helen Keller

Never let your memories be greater than your dreams. — Douglas Ivester

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible. — Lawrence of Arabia

Do not dare not to dare. — C.S. Lewis

Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. — George Adair

Wherever you go, go with all your heart. — Unknown

It seems to be a law of nature, inflexible and inexorable, that those who will not risk cannot win. — John Paul Jones

This is what holidays, travels, vacations are about. It is not really rest or even leisure we chase. We strain to renew our capacity for wonder to shock ourselves into astonishment once again. — Shana Alexander

I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. — Henry Rollins

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in an office or mowing your lawn. Climb that damn mountain. — Jack Kerouac

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. — Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to. — Alan Keightley

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

Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey. — Pat Conroy

No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet. — Patrick Rothfuss

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

The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circ*mstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown. — Paul Theroux

Although I deeply love oceans, deserts and other wild landscapes, it is only mountains that beckon me with that sort of painful magnetic pull to walk deeper and deeper into their beauty. They keep me continuously wanting to know more, feel more, see more. — Victoria Erickson

• Travel With Friends Quotes

A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. — Tim Cahill

You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place. — Miriam Adeney

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson

• Adventure Travel Quotes

Adventure is worthwhile in itself. — Amelia Earhart

If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal. — Paulo Coelho

Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis. — Tim Cahill

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter. — John Muir

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. — Edward Abbey

Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless.

We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. — John Steinbeck

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

A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for. — J.A. Shedd

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any. — Hugh Laurie

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

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

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 – above all, a travel bureau – arrange everything before-hand? — Richard Aldington

Be careful because Cambodia is the most dangerous place you will ever visit. You will fall in love with it, and eventually it will break your heart. — Joel Brinkley

• Solo Travel Quotes

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. — Freya Stark

Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. — Unknown

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 reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses. — Bill Bryson

The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home. — Freya Stark

When you’ve managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown – either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude – there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when we are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free. — Tim Cahill

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. — Lin Yutang

He travels the fastest who travels alone. — Rudyard Kipling

Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection. — Lawrence Durrell

When the traveler goes alone he gets acquainted with himself. — Liberty Hyde Bailey

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. — Henry David Thoreau

I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more. — Thomas Jefferson

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time. — Hannah Arendt

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

I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads. — Paulo Coelho

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose. — Walt Whitman

• Anthony Bourdain Travel Quotes

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.

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. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.

It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about.

For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there — with your eyes open — and lived to see it.

Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.

I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find the 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.

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? … I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.

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.

I think food, culture, people and landscape are all absolutely inseparable.

Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.

Southeast Asia has a real grip on me. From the very first time I went there, it was a fulfillment of my childhood fantasies of the way travel should be.

I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder.

I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.

At this point I think my body is like an old car. Another dent ain’t gonna make a whole lot of difference. At best it’s a reminder that you’re still alive and lucky as hell. Another tattoo, another thing you did, another place you’ve been.

Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund.

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.

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.