There’s something about travel quotes that can inspire even the most reluctant of us to hit the road. Maybe it’s the way they distill the complexities and challenges of travel into a few evocative sentences. Or maybe it’s because they remind us that we’re not alone in our wanderlust. Whatever the reason, there’s no denying the power of a great travel quote.
Whether you’re looking for the perfect Instagram quote, a reason to travel, or a little inspiration, we’ve got a list of travel quotes that’ll inspire you to pack up and go!
Inspirational Travel Quotes
#1 – Why We Travel
“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
#2 – The Beauty of Travel
“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ” – Lin Yutang
#3 – Travel Broadens the Mind
“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
#4 – The Right Direction
“It feels good to be lost in the right direction.” – Unknown
#5 – Keep Leaning Forward
“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
#6 – Travel is Wealth
“Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” – Anonymous
#7 – Always Seeking
“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
#8 – Never Stop Traveling
“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
#9 – Searching to Belong
“Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.” – Roman Payne
#10 – Making Memories
“It is not the destination where you end up but the mishaps and memories you create along the way!” – Penelope Riley
#11 – To Find Oneself
“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
#12 – The Storyteller
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta
#13 – Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes
“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
#14 – To Travel is to Live
“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 – Travel to Experience
“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
#16 – Travel Fills Your Soul
“Jobs fill your pockets, adventures fill your soul.” – Jamie Lyn Beatty
#17 – Travel Changes You
“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
#18 – Those Who Wander
“Not all those who wander are lost” – J.R.R. Tolkien
#19 – Forget the Past
“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
#20 – The World is a Book
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Saint Augustine
#21 – We Are All Just People
“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
#22 – To Be Different
“It is a big and beautiful world. Most of us live and die in the same corner where we were born and never get to see any of it. I don’t want to be most of us.” – Oberyn Martell
#23 – Twenty Years From Now
“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
#24 – Get Up and Go
“To those who stay put, the world is but an imaginary place. But to the movers, the makers, and the shakers, the world is all around, an endless invitation.” – Anonymous
#25 – The Art of Travel
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.” – Freya Stark
#26 – Wherever You Go
“Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” – Confucius
#27 – I Encountered Myself
“I have traveled many roads in my life. Some were imbued with pain and I needed to avert my gaze. Others were so beautiful that I would have remained there forever. But always, at some point in these routes, I reached a place where I encountered myself.” – Pablo Holmberg
#28 – A Matter of Courage
“Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” – Paulo Coelho
#29 – Childlike Wonder
“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
#30 – Life Is an Adventure
“The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.” – Oprah Winfrey
Final Thoughts
There’s definitely something about travel quotes that just resonate with us. Maybe it’s because they speak to our wanderlust spirit, or maybe it’s because they capture the feeling of exploration and discovery. Whatever the reason, we can’t get enough of them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexandrea Sumuel is a nationally syndicated travel writer and founder of the Wander With Alex travel blog. Her work has appeared on MSN, YAHOO!, Euronews, and FOX, ABC, and NBC affiliates across the United States.
Alex travels to experience, eat, explore, and occasionally escape! She collaborates with destinations, vacation property management companies, and hospitality technology firms to provide her readers with exclusive insights and information.