60+ Most Famous Travel Quotes

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Everyone needs a little inspiration sometimes. Even us. So we decided to share a list of some of the most famous travel quotes to help you either travel more or to finally get you to pack your bags and leave for the unknown.

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

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

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

4. “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

5. “The real voyage of discover consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” -Marcel Proust

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

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

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

9. “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” -Unknown

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

11. “To those who stay put, the world is but an imaginary place. But to the
movers, the makers, and the shakers, the world is all around, an endless
invitation.” -Unknown

12. “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

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

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14. “The journey is the destination.” -Dan Eldon

15. “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

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

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

18. “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

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

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

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

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

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

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

25. “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

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

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

28. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” –Elizabeth Drew

29. “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

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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

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

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36. “Not till we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.” -Henry David Thoreau

37. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” –Aldous Huxley

38. “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

39. “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

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

41. “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

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42. “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it is lethal.” -Paulo Coelho

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

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

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

46. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” –Mark Twain

47. “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

48. “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

49. “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

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50. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” –Rudyard Kipling

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

52. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” –Pat Conroy

53. “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

54. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” –John Steinbeck

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

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

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

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

59. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” –Neale Donald Walsch

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

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

62. “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

Which famous travel quotes are your favorites? Did we miss any? Please leave a comment below.

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Comments

  • Yours is a pretty comprehensive collection of travel quotes–I enjoyed perusing them. With all the traveling you do, have you ever tried to pen your own travel quote? If not, which one of the above is your favorite?

    • Thank Tami. Interesting question. Unfortunately we have never really thought about writing our own quote but you got us thinking now. So maybe we come up with our own one day :D Our favorite is 23. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” How about yourself do you have a favorite quote? We would love to hear it.

  • My favorite travel quotes are unintentional travel themes from Yogi Berra:

    – we are lost but making great time.

    – nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.

    – if you see a fork in the road, take it

    well, maybe not the 3rd one! :D

    • Hey Charles,
      Thanks for sharing your favorite quotes. I really like the first one “we are lost but making great time”. We travel to get lost not to get to a destination. It’s one of the best ways to travel.

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