100 Best Travel Quotes
Words to Inspire

Are you in between trips, missing traveling, and looking for some inspiration? Obviously, I believe that traveling is one of the best ways for personal growth and to give life meaning and unsurprisingly I’m a sucker for travel quotes. There’s just something about them that immediately excites and inspires me!

Having traveled to over 50 countries and been a successful travel blogger for almost a decade, I am amazed at how spot on a lot of these best travel quotes are. Being that I am big fan of travel and motivating others, I created a few custom travel quote images to inspire you a little more!

So in my ever-growing attempt to inspire others to travel, here is a collection of the 100 best travel quotes to feed your wanderlust. What are the best travel quotes that inspire you to get out and see the world? Feel free to leave your favorite travel quote in the comment section below!

21. “If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains.”
-Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

22. “You’ll never know the kind of person you could be until you take that first step, all alone, into the great unknown. Very few take the step.”
-Hannah Harding

23. “Wander, and leave a trail of freedom wherever you go.”
-Marty Rubin

24. “There is a difference between arrival and entrance. Arrival is physical and happens all at once. The train pulls in, the plane touches down, you get out of the taxi with all your luggage. You can arrive a place and never really enter it; you get there, look around, take a few pictures, make a few notes, send postcards home. When you travel like this, you think you know where you are, but, in fact, you have never left home. Entering takes longer. You cross over, slowly, in bits and pieces. […] It is like awakening slowly, over a period of weeks. And then one morning, you open your eyes and you are finally here, really and truly here. You are just beginning to know where you are.”
-Jamie Zeppa

25. “As we encounter each other, we see our diversity — of background, race, ethnicity, belief – and how we handle that diversity will have much to say about whether we will in the end be able to rise successfully to the great challenges we face today.”
-Dan Smith, The State of the World Atlas

26.”The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”
–W.B. Yeats

27. “Take the time to put the camera away and gaze in wonder at what’s there in front of you.”
–Erick Widman

28. “I said, but I have to go, there are so many places calling my name.”
-Nikki Rowe

29. “Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.”
–Peter Hoeg

30. “When a man is a traveller, 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

31. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

32. “There is freedom waiting for you, on the breezes of the sky. And you ask “What if I fall?” Oh but my darling, what if you fly?:”
–Erin Hanson

33. “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.

34. “Still round the corner, there may wait, a new road or a secret gate.”
–J. R. R. Tolkien

35. “Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves.”
–Euripides

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

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

40. “We were all in that crammed 8 person hostel room for our own personal reasons; whether we were trying to get away from demons of the past or because you realized we were all fucked up in the head a bit and had to cure chaos with chaos; for whatever reason, we met in that hostel lobby, as the only foreigners on the boat, or ended up traveling across a couple of countries together for a few weeks just because I happened to sit next to you on that bus.”
-Forrest Curran

41. “I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.”
-Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps

42.“Travel is an evolving experience. It doesn’t take place in photographs or your past… Instead it’s tucked up there in your memory and when you need a bit of it, or a new perspective on something hidden within it, it will emerge into your conscious mind”
-Dan Kieran

43. “Four great adventures; read, learn, write and travel.”
-Lailah Gifty Akita

44. “The secret to being a good traveler is liking a place before you get there.”
-Marty Rubin

45. “A little piece of everywhere I go becomes a big part of everything I do.”
-Richie Norton

46. “Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.”
-Amin Maalouf

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

48. “I could leave—because I could return. I could return—because I knew adventure lay just beyond an open door. Instead of either/or, I discovered a whole world of and.”
-Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

49. “…he starts telling them about our day, embellishing it so that it almost sounds fun. It’s how all good travel stories are born. Nightmares spun into punch lines.”
-Gayle Forman, Just One Year

50. “Take time to leave cities, at least once in a year, and go to some natural place, hills, sea, jungles, rivers, where you see nothing but nature… His creations. Where you only hear chirping of birds, clinkering of trees, murmuring of winds, splashes of water in the river, and uproar of waterfalls.”
-Girdhar Joshi, Some Mistakes Have No Pardon

51.“Empty pockets never held anyone back.  Only empty heads and empty hearts can do that.”
-Norman Vincent Peale

52. “Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.”
-Amin Maalouf, Leo Africanus

53. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
-Anita Desai

54. “Travel brings power and love back into your life.”
-Rumi

55. “When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.”
-Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road

56. “Just as much as it is about booking flights, sharing hostel rooms with strangers, and learning to say hello in a variety of languages; travel is about the momentarily times of breakdowns, longing of all the great things back home, and the tears you hold back from each good-bye, which in the entirety, makes up the honest human experience of living.”
-Forrest Curran

57. “A man or woman who travels in the end will never be kept. But if you understand that person well enough, they’ll always be by your side. They might have forgotten where their home is in this world – but you might just make them feel like the closest thing to feeling at home. And while they’ll be leaving country after country, this is the way you will never leave their heart.”
-Lauren Klarfeld

58. “To reduce your age,increase your experiences.”
-Subbu Peteti, Anti-Aging Secrets on the Highway

59. “Traveling shouldn’t be just a tour, it should be a tale.”
-Amit Kalantri

60. “I don’t think someone’s worth can be measured by the number of cities he visited, the number of countries he traveled to or the number of seas and oceans he crossed. One can be a traveler even by simply going to the end of the street.”
-Laure Lacornette

61.“An ardent desire to go took possession of me once more. Not because I wanted to leave – I was quite all right on this Cretan coast, and felt happy and free there and I needed nothing – but because I have always been consumed with one desire; to touch and see as much as possible of the earth and the sea before I die.”
-Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

62. “I can tell about one who didn’t win. And it didn’t matter. Because his destiny was battle, Not the victory. He was born to travel, Not to find destination. He lived to live, Not to make a home.”
-Abdur-Rehman Qadeer

63. “Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves and half in love with oblivion.”
Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of Fascination

64. “I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
–Hilaire Belloc

65. “The most dangerous risk of all: the risk of spending you life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.”

66. “I would rather own little and see the world than own the world and see little of it.”

67. “May my soul forever stay wild and my spirit always be adventurous.”
-Zascha Friis

68. “Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you.  Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before.  How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else- above all, a travel bureau- arrange everything before hand?
-Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero

69. “One of the inescapable encumbrances of leading an interesting life is that there have to be moments when you almost lose it.
-Jimmy Buffet

70. “May your adventures bring you closer together, even as they take you far away from home.”
-Trenton Lee Stewart

71. “You don’t know about the other travelers you meet and they in turn have no idea who you are, and that is truly special, for there isn’t any detrimental preconceived notions about the other, and in this space there is room for understanding and healing. When you backpack, for the first time in a long time, you feel like you belong and are connected to not only with the world, but also with your inner self.”
-Forrest Curran

72. “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. ”
-Agnes Repplier

73. “Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.”
-John Muir, The Mountains of California

74. “There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.”
-Kate Douglas Wiggin, New Chronicles of Rebecca

75. Instructions for Wayfarers:
“They will declare: Every journey has been taken.
You shall respond: I have not been to see myself.
They will insist: Everything has been spoken.
You shall reply: I have not had my say.

They will tell you: Everything has been done.
You shall reply: My way is not complete.

You are warned: Any way is long, any way is hard.
Fear not. You are the gate-you, the gatekeeper.
And you shall go through and on…”
-Alexandros Evangelou Xenopouloudakis, Third Wish

76. “The farther you go, however, the harder it is to return. The world has many edges, and it’s easy to fall off.”
-Anderson Cooper

77. “The journey itself is my home.”
-Matsuo Bashō

78.“All you need to know is that it’s possible.”
-Wolf, an Appalachian Trail Hiker

79. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974

80. “When I first travelled, I was naive, sloppy, wide-eyed, and nothing happened to me. That’s probably where the dumb luck came in. Then I began to read the guidebooks, the State Department warnings, the endless elucidation of national norms, cultural cues and insults and regional dangers, and I became wary, careful, savvy. I kept my money taped inside my shoe, or strapped to my stomach. I took any kind of precaution, believing that the people of this area did this, and the people of that province did that.

But then, finally, I realized no one of any region did anything I have ever expected them to do, much less anything the guidebooks said they would. Instead, they behaved as everyone behaves, which is to say they behave as individuals of damnably infinite possibility. Anyone could do anything, in theory, but most of the time everyone everywhere acts with plain bedrock decency, helping where help is needed, guiding where guidance is necessary. It’s almost weird.”
-Dave Eggers

81. “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

82. “I read; I travel; I become.”
-Derek Walcott

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

84.”Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
-Jack Kerouac

85.“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.”
-Lawrence Block

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

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

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

89. “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.”
-Tennessee Williams, Camino Real

90. “Don’t you think it’s actually harder for you…to adapt, I mean? Because you’ve done all that stuff?’ ‘Are you asking me if I wish I’d never done it?’ ‘I’m just wondering if it would have been easier for you. If you’d led a smaller life. To live like this, I mean.’ ‘I will never, ever regret the things I’ve done. Because most days, if you’re stuck in one of these, all you have are the places in your memory that you can go to.’ He smiled. It was tight, as if it cost him. ‘So if you’re asking me would I rather be reminiscing about the view of the caste from the minimart, or that lovely row of shops, down off the roundabout, then, no. My life was just fine, thanks.
-JoJo Moyres- Me Before You

91.“You can shake the sand from your shoes, but it will never leave your soul.”

92.“Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.”
-Alan Keightley

93. “I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.”
-John Green

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

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

96.“Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.”
–Paolo Coelho

97. “If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.”
–Anthony Bourdain

98. “Take every chance you get in life, because some things only happen once.”
–Karen Gibbs

99. “If while on your way you meet no one your equal or better, steadily continue on your way alone. There is no fellowship with fools.”
-Dhammapada

100. “Great growth comes from loneliness. You have time to develop, dwell in your own mind and go a bit mad. All great people are a bit mad. That’s good to remember. Don’t escape it.

Great growth comes from time spent in foreign lands, watching foreign people with foreign cultures. It makes you forget about your own land and race and town for a while. Great growth also comes from rooting yourself into one place from time to time. Unpack your bags, get a nice bed, a book shelf, some friends. Learn to show up, keep in touch, stick around.

Growth comes in all sort of forms and shapes, everywhere at all times, and it’s yours to take and consume. Do what ought to be done. Here and now, to get you somewhere — anywhere.”
-Charlotte Eriksson