100 Of The Best Inspirational Travel Quotes of All Time

Travel lifts the spirit, it inspires us and makes us feel alive. Exploring new lands and getting to know new cultures other than our own has moved adventurous travelers and explorers for thousands of years. Here are one hundred of the most inspiring travel quotes of all time that are sure to uplift and motivate you to pursue your wanderlust.

1. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” – Anais Nin2. “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” – Saint Augustine

2. “The road is there, it will always be there. You just have to decide when to take it.” -Chris Humphrey

3. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” -Benjamin Disraeli

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

5. “You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.” – William Hazlitt

6. “Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.” – Lawrence Durrell

7. “If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.” – John D. Rockefeller

8. “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

9. “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

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

11. “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

12. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

13. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

14. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton

15. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

16. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” – Charles Dudley Warner

17. “The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.” – Wallace Stevens

18. “The journey not the arrival matters.” –T. S. Eliot

19. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” –Tim Cahill

20. “Discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in seeing with new eyes.” Marcel Proust

21. “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

22. “Not all those who wander are lost.” –J. R. R. Tolkien

23. “Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road.” – Walt Whitman

24. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”. – Anatole France

25. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” –Seneca

26. “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

27. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” –Lillian Smith

28. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – Andre Gide

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

30. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” – Samuel Johnson

31. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

32. “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

33. “When a man is a Traveler, the world is his house & the sky is his roof, where he hangs his hat is his home, & all the people are his family”

34. “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 to fall in love once more.” – Pico Iyer,

35. “We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.” ~ T. S. Eliot

36. “He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry

37. “Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” —Amelia Earhart

38. ‘Where curious and curiosity keep leading us down new paths” – Walt Disney

39. “People don’t take trips – trips take people.” – John Steinbeck

40. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmache

41. “He who returns from a journey is not the same as he who left.” – Chinese proverb

42. “To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Andersen

43. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck12. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

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

45. “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” –Confucius

46. “The question is not what you look at but what you see.” – Henry David

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

48. “You lose sight of things… and when you travel, everything balances out.” – Daranna Gidel

49. “Travel is like a giant blank canvas, and the painting on the canvas is only limited by one’s imagination.” – Ross Morley

50. “One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.” – Thomas Jefferson

51. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” – Herman Melville

52. “Travel is like knowledge, the more you see, the more you know you haven’t seen” – Mark Hertsgaad

53. “Life isn’t about the number of breaths you take. It’s the moments that take your breath away.”

54. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – R. Stevenson

55. “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta

56. “I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me” – Walt Whitman

57. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

58. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things” – Henry Miller

59. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have traveled. “–Mohammed

60. “A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

61. “Travel opens your heart, broadens your mind and fills your life with stories to tell.” – Paula Bendfeldt

62. “Take only memories, leave only footprints.” – Chief Seattle

63. “You only live once but if you travel…once its enough “

64. “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” – Anonymous

65. “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.” — Ralph Waldo

66. “Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.” Sir Francis Bacon

67. “A true traveler’s journey is never complete” ~jda

68. “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

69. “Little by little, one travels far.” J.R.R. Tolkien

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

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

72. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

73. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” –Ling Yutang

74. “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

75. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

76. “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

77. “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

78. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G. K. Chesterton

79. “You can never cross the ocean until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – Christopher Columbus

80. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence

81. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

82. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

83. “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

84. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

85. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

86. “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.” – G. K. Chesterton

87. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni

88. One does not discover new lands without consenting to loose sight of land for a very long time. – Andre Gide

89. “It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be.” – Selma Lagerlaf

90. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman

91. “As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.” – Margaret Mead

92. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Fitzhugh Mullan

93. “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon

94. “Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.” – Ray Bradbury

95. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” – Hilaire Belloc

96. “You can’t control the past, but you can control where you go next.” ― Kirsten Hubbard

97. “One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.” – Charles Dickens

98. “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” – Frank Herbert

99. “Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.” – Drake

100. “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

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Paula Bendfeldt-Diaz

Paula moved from her native Guatemala to SW Florida with her husband and two children and together they are discovering what it means to live life between two languages.

Paula studied architecture and now makes a living as a freelance writer,traveler and amateur photographer.She started her writing & publishing career as the editor of Bebé y Mamá, the first parenting magazine in Guatemala.She is the founder of www.GrowingUpBilingual.com and www.365thingsswfl.com and writes articles in Spanish and English for both magazines and the web on travel,food and bicultural and bilingual parenting .

When she is not on a plane or road trip she likes to create recipes inspired in the flavors of her native Guatemala.

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