I have been collecting wonderful words of wisdom about travel for some time now and these are my favourite travel quotes. Some are philosophical, some wry and self-deprecating. Some examine the reasons for travel and others the impact travel inevitably has on us. In my opinion they are the best travel quotes:
1. “I [had] seen several different sorts of life being led… which I could never have imagined…. I had added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.” Evelyn Waugh
2. “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 harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain
3. “Not all those who wander are lost.” JRR Tolkien
4. “One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, 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.” Richard Burton
5. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Henry Miller
6. “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
7. “Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” Kurt Vonnegut
8. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” St Augustine
9. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
10. “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.” Cesare Pavese
11. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” Robert Louis Stevenson
12. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” Aldous Huxley
13. “I have wandered all my life, and I have also travelled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.” Hilaire Belloc
14. “You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.” William Hazlitt
15. “Certainly, 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
16. “Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building after seeing Italy.” Fanny Burney
17. “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.” Gilbert K. Chesterton
18. “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
19. “Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” Ernest Hemingway
20. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” Oscar Wilde
21. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” Anais Nin
22. “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
23. “Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” Benjamin Disraeli
24. “Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
25. “Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.” Hypatia
26. “The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” Gilbert K. Chesterton
27. “A traveller without observation is a bird without wings.” Moslih Eddin Saadi
28. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” Freya Stark
29. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” Lao Tzu
30. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” Jack Kerouac
31. “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go.” Dr Seuss
32. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” Mark Twain
33. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
34. “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.” Jawaharal Nehru
35. “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.” Tennessee Williams
36. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” Mary Anne Radmacher
37. “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
38. “Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones.” Anne Sophie Swetchine
39. “I read; I travel; I become.” Derek Walcott
40. “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
41. “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 leveller, the great teacher; bitter as medicine, crueller than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.” Patrick Rothfuss
42. “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
43. “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 (Fahrenheit 451)
44. “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
45. “It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. ‘I am watching you — are you watching yourself in me?’ Most travelers hurry too much…the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly — but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling…you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you’ll be there.” Lawrence Durrell
46. “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
47. “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
48. “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 Hat Full of Sky
49. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” Paul Theroux
50. “Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.” Ryū Murakami
51. “Sometimes a journey arises out of hope and instinct, the heady conviction, as your finger travels along the map: Yes, here and here … and here. These are the nerve-ends of the world …” Colin Thubron
52. “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 traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell
53. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in a 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
54. “Real adventure is not polished. It is not the result of some marketing budget. There is no hashtag for it. It burns brightest on the map’s edges but it exists in all of us. It exists at the intersection of the imagination and the ridiculous.” Kyle Dempster
55. “Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” Mary Ritter Beard
56. “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 (in Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)
57. “For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.” Aldous Huxley
58. “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
59. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” Dagobert D. Runes
60. “Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing” Helen Keller
61. “Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes – with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is invigorating.” Michael Crichton
62. Travelling is like flirting with life. It is like saying, I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.” Lisa St Aubin de Teran
63. “Keep your face always toward the sunshine and shadows will fall behind you.” Walt Whitman
64. “To travel is to awaken.” Lily Tsay
65. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that 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. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” Ralph Waldo Emerson
67. “He who would travel happily must travel light.” Antoine de St. Exupery
68. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” Andre Gide
69. “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
70. “Wherever you go, go with all your heart!” Confucius
71. “Conventional wisdom tells us… we take our baggage with us. I’m not so sure. Travel, at its best, transforms us in ways that aren’t always apparent until we’re back home. Sometimes we do leave our baggage behind, or, even better, it’s misrouted to Cleveland and is never heard from again.” Eric Weiner
72. “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
73. “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
74. “My life has been a tapestry of rich and royal hue. A everlasting vision of the ever-changing view. A wondrous, woven magic in bits of blue and gold. A tapestry to feel and see, impossible to hold.” Carole King
75. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” Anita Desai
76. “Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret” Oscar Wilde
77. “I travel not to cross countries off a list, but to ignite passionate affairs with destinations.” Nyssa P. Chopra
I hope these top travel quotes inspire you, amuse you, take you to the places of your travel dreams.
Natasha von Geldern
Do you have any more suggestions of top travel quotes for me?
