I was a voracious reader when I was growing up, typically reading two books a week on average.
My lower-middle class family didn’t have the money to do much in the way of traveling, outside of the occasional camping trip in North Georgia. Both my parents worked, and my dad worked multiple jobs to support his family of five.
The furthest we ever traveled was a trip to visit my godparents in Virginia when I was 14. So instead I read books about travel and adventure long before I had the financial means to start taking adventures of my own.
It was the written word that originally fueled my travel dreams, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books to Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
It was through Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, John Muir’s Our National Parks, and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature that I developed a passion for the environment. Without them, who knows if I would’ve become the advocate for ecotourism and wildlife conservation I am today.
And when I finally started traveling, the work of travel writers such as Jon Krakauer, Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux greatly influenced the way I did it.
But the first classic Quote I remember having a significant impact on me came in the form of a Robert Frost poem: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.” This idea influenced many of my choices, setting me on the path to becoming a full-time professional writer in my twenties.
For me, these inspirational Travel Quotes aren’t just words: They are the distillation of a philosophy that continues to drive my life and work today. I hope they will prove equally influential for you… –Bret Love; photos by Bret Love & Mary Gabbett
READ MORE: The Best Travel Books to Inspire A Love of Adventure
- Inspirational Travel Quotes
- Quotes about Adventure Travel
- Short Travel Quotes
- Family Travel Quotes
- Solo Travel Quotes
- Couples Travel Quotes
- Safe Travel Quotes
- Famous Travel Quotes
- Motivational Travel Quotes
- Nature Travel Quotes
Inspirational Travel Quotes
1. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust
2. “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
3. “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
4. “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
5. “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
6. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” –Paul Theroux
7. “One of the gladdest moments of human life, me thinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.” –Sir Richard Burton
8. “I travel around the world in a way that tries to open my mind and give me empathy and inspire me to come home and make this world a better place.” –Rick Steves
9. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust
10. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” –Mary Anne Radmacher
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Quotes About Adventure Travel
11. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” –Andre Gide
12. “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.” –Jawaharial Nehru
13. “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 the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” –H. Jackson Brown Jr.
14. “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
15. “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
16. “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.” –Paulo Coelho
17. “Adventure isn’t hanging on a rope off the side of a mountain. Adventure is an attitude that we must apply to the day to day obstacles in life.’’ –John Amatt
18. “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” –Ray Bradbury
19. “Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.” –Irving Wallace
20. “There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t sit still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don’t know how to rest.” —Robert W. Service
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Short Travel Quotes
21. “Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” –Anonymous
22. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” –Helen Keller
23. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” –Saint Augustine
24. “Travel brings power and love back into your life.” –Rumi
25. “Only one who wanders finds new paths.” –Norwegian Proverb
26. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” –Lao Tzu
27. “Make voyages! Attempt them… there’s nothing else.” –Tennesee Williams
28. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” –Anais Nin
29. “Your feet will take you where your heart is.” –Irish proverb
30. “Until you step into the unknown, you don’t know what you’re made of.” –Roy T. Bennett
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Family Travel Quotes
31. “To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition, to know that even one life has breathed better because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
32. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” –Lin Yutang
33. “The best education you will ever get is traveling. Nothing teaches you more than exploring the world and accumulating experiences.” –Mark Paterson
34. “Travel is like an endless university. You never stop learning.” –Harvey Lloyd
35. “If real, regular, normal, boring life, (when you’re at home every day, seeing the same people, doing the same things) is like sitting at home on the floor surrounded by toys… traveling feels to me like going to Toys R Us with your toy box and getting to trade stuff in and buy new things and explore whole new ideas.” –Alex Day
36. “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children” –Chief Seattle
37. “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
38. “Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings.” –Hodding Carter
39. “When you travel with children you are giving something that can never be taken away… experience, exposure, and a way of life.” –Pamela T. Chandler
40. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” –Tim Cahill
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Solo Travel Quotes
41. “The further I go, the closer to me I get.” –Andrew McCarthy
42. “A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.” –Roman Payne, The Wanderess
43 “I am convinced that the jealous, the angry, the bitter and the egotistical are the first to race to the top of mountains. A confident person enjoys the journey, the people they meet along the way and sees life not as a competition. They reach the summit last because they know God isn’t at the top waiting for them. He is down below helping his followers to understand that the view is glorious where ever you stand.” –Shannon L. Alder
44. “A person susceptible to ‘wanderlust’ is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” — Pico Iyer
45. “How will I know who I can become if I don’t give myself the chance to try new things, to push myself beyond my normal boundaries? Who might I be if I am away from the things that I currently use to define myself?” ― Eileen Cook, With Malice
46. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I– I took the one less traveled by… And that has made all the difference.” –Robert Frost
47. “To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.” – Charles Horton Cooley
48. “Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.” – Eudora Welty
49. “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” — The Dhammapada
50. “All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me, and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money, or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality. I wanted the open road and new beginnings every day.” — Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: In Search For The Great Perhaps
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Couples Travel Quotes
51. “As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen.”—A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh
52. “Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
53. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
54. “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, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” — Pico Iyer
55. “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” — Shirley MacLaine
56. “Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures.”– Lewis Carroll
57. “Traveling 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
58. “What we find in a soulmate is not something wild to tame, but something wild to run with.” — Robert Brault
59. “Love is the food of life, travel is dessert.” – Anonymous
60. “To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” — Rebecca Solnit (A Field Guide to Getting Lost)
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Safe Travel Quotes
61. “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
62. “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow! What a Ride!'” — Hunter S. Thompson (The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967)
63. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” – James Michener
64. “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
65. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all the 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
66. “Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.” – Jennifer Lee
67. “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
68. “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
69. “It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.” – Alan Cohen
70. “Be spontaneous, never be afraid to try new things or find new ways. Don’t let overplanning and routine poison your life.” ― Mouloud Benzadi
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Famous Travel Quotes
71. “It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.” -Henry David Thoreau
72. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson
73. “Not all those who wander are lost.” –J.R.R. Tolkien
74. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” –Neale Donald Walsch
75. “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footsteps on the moon.” – Paul Brandt
76. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” – George Bernard Shaw
77. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the Universe.” –Anatole France
78. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” –St. Augustine
79. “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.” —H. Jackson Brown, Jr. in P.S. I Love You
80. “I find the great thing in this world is not so much about where we stand, as in what direction we are moving… We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, – but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
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Motivational Travel Quotes
81. “Stop creating a life that you need a vacation from. Instead, move to where you want to live, do what you want to do, start what you want to start, and create the life you want today. This isn’t rehearsal, people. This is YOUR life.” –Dale Partridge
82. “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
83. “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
84. “Travel is the antidote to fear. It makes you see the similarities and differences that exist around the world, and it opens your eyes– and mind– to new and different approaches.” –Julia Cosgrove
85. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
86. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
87. “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
88. “Travel while you are young and able. Don’t worry about the money, just make it work. Experience is far more valuable than money will ever be.” — Anonymous
89. “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
90. “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
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Nature Travel Quotes
91. “Look deeper into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” –Albert Einstein
92. “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, This is what it is to be happy.” –Sylvia Plath
93. “Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.” –Schopenhauer
94. “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 away from you like the leaves of Autumn.” —John Muir, The Mountains of California
95. “When the blood in your veins returns to the sea, and the earth in your bones returns to the ground, perhaps then you will remember that this land does not belong to you– it is YOU who belongs to this land.” –Native American proverb
96. “Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.” –Cree Indian Proverb
97. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” –Henry David Thoreau
98. “Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep, and swim far, so you shall come back with new self-respect, with new power, and with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
99. ”There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar
I love not man the less, but nature more.” –Lord Byron
100. “We only know a tiny proportion about the complexity of the natural world. Wherever you look, there are still things we don’t know about and don’t understand. There are always new things to find out if you go looking for them.” ―David Attenborough
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