101 Best Travel Quotes to Inspire your Wanderlust in 2021
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A compilation of travel quotes feels equivalent to a collection of fantasies and day dreams right about now. But I suppose that’s rather appropriate for this year, as I’ve had plenty of time to day dream while practicing social isolation. And those memes about filling my passport with trips to the kitchen, the couch, and my bed? I smile and laugh, but secretly they feel a little too real for comfort. Anyone else earning frequent flier miles for trips to the fridge?
I’ve slowly accepted that the closest I’ll get to traveling Europe this year is the puzzle of Amsterdam I did in my living room. In my still moments, I’m reading everything I can by Irish authors. And in my more restless moments, I’ve contemplated joining others in recreating famous works of art with random things I can scavenge from around my house. Am I desperate enough to create an airplane window view out of a toilet seat and laptop background? Well, it’s not quite that dire yet. But it’s close.
And I’ve found that each passing week seems to get just a little bit harder. I’m struggling with a serious case of cabin fever here! So while I try to maintain my sanity over here, please enjoy this list of my top ten favorite travel quotes and proverbs. I’ve ordered them in a flow that tells its own wanderlust-filled story.
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 your 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 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
10. “A ship at harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” -John A Shedd
11. “If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” -Rachel Wolchin
“If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots in steady of feet.”-Rachel Wolchin-101 Best Travel Quotes to Inspire your Wanderlust in 2021 Click To Tweet
12. “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
13. “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” -Robyn Yong
14. “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
“We travel initially to lose ourselves; and we travel next to find ourselves.” -Patrick Rothfuss—101 Best Travel Quotes to Inspire your Wanderlust in 2021 Click To Tweet
15. “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
16. “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
17. “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
18. “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
Quotes About How Travel Changes Us
19. “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” -Ibn Batutta
20. “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
21. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
22. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” -Gustave Flaubert
23. “Travel sparks our imagination, feeds our curiosity and reminds us how much we all have in common.” -Deborah Lloyd
24. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” -Mary Anne Radmacher
Travel Quotes About Home
25. “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
26. “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
27. “A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.” -Henry Rollins
28. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
29. “Wild hearts find a home in every place they roam.” -C. Churchill
30. “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
31. “Your feet will take you where your heart is.” -Irish Proverb
32. “He who is outside his door already has the hardest part of his journey behind him.” -Dutch Proverb
33. “Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.” -Chinese Proverb
34. “Who lives sees much. Who travels sees more.” -Arab Proverb
On the Journey, the Road, the Destination
35. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” -Lao Tzu
36. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” -Susan Sontag
37. “I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.” -David Bowie
38. “The best journeys are the ones that answer questions that at the onset you never thought to ask.” -Rick Ridgeway
39. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” -Lao Tzu
40. “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
41. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” -Robert Frost
42. “There are roads left in both of our shoes.” -Death Cab for Cutie, Soul Meets Body
Travel Quotes About Tourists v. Travelers
43. “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
44. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve bee, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” -Paul Theroux
45. “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” -G. K. Chesterton
46. “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
47. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.” -Freya Stark
48. “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
49. “Travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living.” -Anthony Bourdain
50. “Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.” -Anthony Bourdain
51. “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
52. “A person susceptible to ‘wanderlust’ is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” -Pico Iyer
53. “Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.” -Pico Iyer
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, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” -Pico Iyer
55. “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
56. “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” -Henry David Thoreau
57. “The world is big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.” -John Muir
58. “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” -John Muir
59. “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
60. “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
61. “For always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known.” -Alfred Tennyson
62. “Live life with on excuses, travel with no regret.” -Oscar Wilde
63. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” -T. S. Elliot
64. “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
65. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” -Mark Twain
66. “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” -Kurt Vonnegut
67. “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
68. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” -Herman Melville, Moby Dick
69. “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
70. “Travel far enough to meet yourself.” -David Mitchel, Cloud Atlas
71. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” -Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
72. “Would you like an adventure now or shall we have our tea first?” -Peter Pan
73. “Not all those who wander are lost.” -J.J.R. Tolkien
74. “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
75. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” -St. Augustine
76. “I read, I travel, I become.” -Derek Walcott
77. “Of all the books in all the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.” -Saber Ben Hassen
78. “With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.” -Sandra Lake
79. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have traveled.” -Muhammad
Travel Quotes About Wealth
80. “Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer.” -Anonymous
81. “I would rather own a little and see the world than own the world and see a little of it.” -Alexander Sattler
82. “Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” -Alexander Solzhenitsyn
83. “To travel is to possess the world.” -Burton Holmes
Quotes on Adventure
84. “Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.” -Lovelle Drachman
85. “If happiness is the goal—and it should be, then adventures should be a priority.” -Richard Branson
86. “Nothing adventured, nothing attained.” -Peter McWilliams
87. “You must go on adventures to find out where you truly belong.” -Sue Fitzmaurice
88. “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
89. “Travel doesn’t become adventure until you leave yourself behind.” -Marty Rubin
Travel Quotes That Offer Advice
90. “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” -Dalai Lama
91. “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” -Stephen Covey
92. “We must travel in the direction of our fear.” -John Berryman
93. “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
94. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” -Susan Heller
95. “Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints, kill nothing but time.” -Aliyyah Eniath
96. “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.” -Cesare Pavese
97. “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
98. “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
99. “We take photos as a return ticket to a moment otherwise gone.” -Travelermentality
100. “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
101. “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
Now I know there are a lot of travel quotes out there, and I’ve only shared a few of them. I’d love to hear from you. So tell me, what are your favorite travel quotes, and why do they speak to you?
If you’re looking to do a little more day dreaming on traveling to escape the harsh and bizarre realities of 2020, check out Clarice’s Travel Bucket List. Until next time, I hope your pants stay comfy and your fridge is full!
