103 Best Travel Quotes to Inspire your Wanderlust in 2023

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For all those out there with hearts full of reisefieber (that’s German for travel fever), this post goes out to you. I’ve collected the 103 best travel quotes to fuel your wanderlust, caption your Instagram posts, and inspire your next adventure. I hope you enjoy.

This post was updated February 2023.

Quotes That Define Travel

1.”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

2. “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

3. “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

How Travel Defines Us

4. “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

5. “So much of who we are is where we have been.” -William Langewiesche

6. “You get a strange feeling when you leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love, but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you’ll never be this way ever again.” -Azar Nafisi

7. “One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are.” -Edith Wharton

8. “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” -Shirley Maclaine

Quotes About Why We Travel

9. “I’ll never be content to stay forever in one place. I’m too madly in love with all the places I haven’t been, the people I haven’t met, the food I haven’t tried, and the streets I haven’t danced on.” -Brooke Hamptom

10. “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” -Robyn Yong

11. “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 where 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.” -Patrick Rothfuss

12. “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

13. “We travel because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something inside our minds has changed, and that changes everything.” -Jonah Lehrer

14. “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

15. “I travel because I’d rather look back at my life, saying ‘I can’t believe I did that’ instead of ‘If only I had…’” -Florine Bos

16. “I need to move around a bit. To shuffle my surroundings. To wake up in cities I don’t know my way around and have conversations in languages I cannot entirely comprehend. There is always this tremendous longing in my heart to be lost, to be someplace else, to be far far away from all of this.” -Beau Taplin

We were made to move

17. “I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question.” -Harun Yahya

18. “A ship at harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” -John A Shedd

19. “If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” -Rachel Wolchin

Quotes About How Travel Changes Us

20. “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” -Ibn Batutta

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

22. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes

23. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” -Gustave Flaubert

24. “Travel sparks our imagination, feeds our curiosity and reminds us how much we all have in common.” -Deborah Lloyd

25. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” -Mary Anne Radmacher

Travel Quotes About Home

26. “You will never be completely 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

27. “We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. We are homesick most for the places we have never known.” -Carson McCullers

28. “A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.” -Henry Rollins

29. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” -Robert Louis Stevenson

30. “Wild hearts find a home in every place they roam.” -C. Churchill

31. “A man does not belong to the place where he was born, but where he chooses to die.” -Orson Welles

Proverbs From Around the World

32. “Your feet will take you where your heart is.” -Irish Proverb

33. “He who is outside his door already has the hardest part of his journey behind him.” -Dutch Proverb

34. “Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.” -Chinese Proverb

35. “Who lives sees much. Who travels sees more.” -Arab Proverb

On the Journey, the Road, the Destination

36. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” -Lao Tzu

37. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” -Susan Sontag

38. “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” -David Bowie

39. “The best journeys are the ones that answer questions that at the onset you never thought to ask.” -Rick Ridgeway

40. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” -Lao Tzu

41. “Because the greatest part of a road trip isn’t arriving at your destination. It’s all the wild stuff that happens along the way.” -Emma Chase

42. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” -Robert Frost

43. “There are roads left in both of our shoes.” -Death Cab for Cutie, Soul Meets Body

Travel Quotes About Tourists v. Travelers

44. “When a man is a Traveler, the world is his house and the sky is his roof, where he hangs his hat is his home, and all the people are his family.” -Drew Bundini Brown

45. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” -Paul Theroux

46. “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” -G. K. Chesterton

47. “Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what’s right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.” -Andrew Zimmern

Travel Quotes From Explorers and Travel Writers

Freya Stark

Freya Stark (1893-1993) was a British/Italian explorer and travel writer. She traveled extensively in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Asia. In fact, she was one of the first non-Arabs to cross the Arabian Desert.

48. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.” -Freya Stark

49. “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

Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018), chef, travel writer and documentarian. This is a man who needs no introduction. He taught us about other cultures and countries, unapologetically examining both the good and the bad with raw honesty and respect.

50. “Travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living.” -Anthony Bourdain

51. “Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.” -Anthony Bourdain

52. “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

Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer (1957–) is a contemporary British travel writer. He tends to focus his writing on often over-looked topics. For example, he examines the disconnect between local tradition and global pop culture, the cultural repercussions of isolation, and how travel can help us find a calm and stillness in today’s busy pace.

53. “A person susceptible to ‘wanderlust’ is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” -Pico Iyer

54. “Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.” -Pico Iyer

55. “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, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” -Pico Iyer

56. “Anybody who travels knows that you’re not really doing so in order to move around—you’re traveling in order to be moved. And really what you’re seeing is not just the Grand Canyon or the Great Wall but some moods or intimations or places inside yourself that you never ordinarily see when you’re sleepwalking through your daily life.” -Pico Iyer

Travel Quotes From Naturalists

57. “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” -Henry David Thoreau

58. “The world is big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” -John Muir

59. “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” -John Muir

60. “Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.” -John Muir

Travel Quotes From Great Literary Authors

61. “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 Anderson

62. “For always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known.” -Alfred Tennyson

63. “Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.” -Oscar Wilde

64. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” -T. S. Elliot

65. “It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.” -F Scott Fitzgerald

66. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” -Mark Twain

67. “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” -Kurt Vonnegut

68. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all people cry, laugh, eat, worry and diet, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” -Maya Angelou

Travel Quotes From Books

69. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” -Herman Melville, Moby Dick

70. “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, Game of Thrones

71. “Travel far enough to meet yourself.” -David Mitchel, Cloud Atlas

72. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” -Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

73. “Would you like an adventure now or shall we have our tea first?” -Peter Pan

74. “Not all those who wander are lost.” -J.J.R. Tolkien

75. “It’s a dangerous business…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

Travel Quotes on Books and Education

76. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” -St. Augustine

77. “I read, I travel, I become.” -Derek Walcott

78. “Of all the books in all the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.” -Saber Ben Hassen

79. “With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.” -Sandra Lake

80. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have traveled.” -Muhammad

Travel Quotes About Wealth

81. “Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer.” -Anonymous

82. “I would rather own a little and see the world than own the world and see a little of it.” -Alexander Sattler

83. “Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn

84. “To travel is to possess the world.” -Burton Holmes

Quotes on Adventure

85. “Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.” -Lovelle Drachman

86. “If happiness is the goal—and it should be, then adventures should be a priority.” -Richard Branson

87. “Nothing adventured, nothing attained.” -Peter McWilliams

88. “You must go on adventures to find out where you truly belong.” -Sue Fitzmaurice

89. “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

90. “Travel doesn’t become adventure until you leave yourself behind.” -Marty Rubin

Travel Quotes That Offer Advice

91. “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” -Dalai Lama

92. “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” -Stephen Covey

93. “We must travel in the direction of our fear.” -John Berryman

94. “Cover the earth before it covers you.” -Dagobert D Runes

95. “Travel while you’re young and able. Don’t worry about the money, just make it work. Experience is far more valuable than money will ever be.” -David Avocado Wolfe

96. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” -Susan Heller

97. “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time.” -Aliyyah Eniath

98. “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.” -Cesare Pavese

99. “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

100. “Do yourself a favor. Before it’s too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.” -Jhumpa Lahiri

Travel Memories

101. “We take photos as a return ticket to a moment otherwise gone.” -Travelermentality

102. “I have worn the dust of many foreign streets, but to brush it off would surely be a crime. I have the memories of many foreign adventures, but to forget them, would surely be a sin. So, breath in the dust, and keep the memories in.” -Rowland Waring-Flood

103. Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.” -Will Rogers

Without a doubt, there are a lot of amazing travel quotes out there. However, I’ve only shared a few of them. Do you have a favorite quote I missed? I’d love to hear from you. So tell me, what are your favorite travel quotes, and why do they speak to you?

Also, if you’re looking for a little more travel inspiration, check out Clarice’s Travel Bucket List. Or if you’re looking for more quotes, you can check out 13 John Muir Quotes for the Adventurers at Heart, too.

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