Over time I have read through, related to, been moved by, and thus gathered many quotations. If you follow me on Instagram (@LaDolceLisa) it is no secret that I adore quotes of all kinds, as I love to pair them with my photography. That being said, travel quotes in particular have always spoken to me on a personal level. I have decided to select my favourites (which evidently are well over 100 travel quotes) and share them with all of you. Wanderlust inspired quotations are universally loved, as they speak to the traveler in all of us. These quotes truly inspire me and I hope they do the same for you. So, in no particular order, please enjoy this list of travel quotes that I have compiled below and paired with a few photos from my travels:
- “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page” – St. Augustine
- “Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures” – Lewis Carroll
- “Wherever you go, go with all your heart” – Confucius
- “Wandering is the activity of the child, the passion of the genius; it is the discovery of the self, the discovery of the outside world, and the learning of how the self is both “at one with” and “separate from” the outside world. These discoveries are as fundamental to the soul as “learning to survive” is fundamental to the body. These discoveries are essential to realizing what it means to be human. To wander is to be alive” – Roman Payne
- “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step” – Leo Tzu
- “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things” – Henry Miller
- “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
- “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
- “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else” – R. Buckminster Fuller
- “For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return” – Leonardo da Vinci
- “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 whose 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” – Pico Iyer
- “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
- “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost” – Erol Ozan
- “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” – Lilian Smith
- “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow” – Anita Desai
- “I was an adventurer, but she was not an adventuress. She was a ‘wanderess.’ Thus, she didn’t care about money, only experiences – whether they came from wealth or from poverty, it was all the same to her” – Roman Payne
- “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
- “No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. 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
- “Travel, for me, is a breathtaking experience. A humbling for the soul and the realization that we are all in this together” – Michael Holbrook
- “I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine” – Caskie Stinnett
- “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun” – Christopher McCandless (Alexander Supertramp)
- “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
- “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life” – Agnes Repplier
- “Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered” – Kahlil Gibran
- “The best way to know a city is to eat it” – Scott Westerfeld
- “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone” – Wendell Berry
- “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller” – Ibn Battuta
- “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
- “Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit” – Frank Borman
- “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
- “Adventure is worthwhile” – Aesop
- “Traveling is the great true love of my life… I am loyal and constant in my love of travel. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby – I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me” – Elizabeth Gilbert
- “Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions” – Peter Hoeg
- “Seeing something once is better than hearing about it a hundred times” – Lisa See
- “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there” – Pascal Mercier
- “The world is full of wonderful things you haven’t seen yet. Don’t ever give up on the chance of seeing them” – J.K. Rowling
- “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference” – Robert Frost
- “If traveling was free you’d never see me again” – Unknown
- “Take only memories, leave only footprints” – Chief Seattle
- “I guess the lesson is you can’t go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can” – Charles Finch
- “Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling” – Roman Payne
- “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
- “Eat well. Travel often” – Unknown
- “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
- “Not all those who wander are lost” – J.R.R. Tolkien
- “The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..” – Paul Theroux
- “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer” – Unknown
- “Adventure rewrites the routine of our lives and wakes us sharply from the comforts of the familiar. It allows us to see how vast the expanse of our experience. Our ability to grow is no longer linear but becomes unrestricted to any direction we wish to run” – John Gates
- “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls” – Anais Nin
- “You don’t have to be rich to travel well” – Eugene Fodor
- “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe” – Anatole France
- “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
- “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it” – Charles Dudley Warner
- “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us” – Unknown
- “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
- “To travel is to live” – Hans Christian Anderson
- “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
- “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore” – Andre Gide
- “Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars…” – Jack Kerouac
- “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey” – Babs Hoffman
- “I want a life measured in first steps on foreign soils and deep breaths in brand new seas. I want a life measured in welcome signs, each stamped with a different name, borders marked with metal and paint. Show me the streets that don’t know the music of my wandering feet and I will play their song upon them. Perfume me please in the smells of far away, I will never wash my hair if it promises to stay. I want a life measured in the places I haven’t gone, short sleeps on long flights and new words to describe the dawn” – Tyler Knott Gregson
- “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list” – Susan Sontag
- “I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side” – Roman Payne
- “I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it” – Charles Bukowski
- “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” – T.S. Eliot
- “People don’t take trips, trips take people” – John Steinbeck
- “To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice” – Elizabeth Gilbert
- “He who would travel happily must travel light” – Antoine de St. Exupery
- “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
- “Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands” – Francis Bacon
- “It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling” – Gustave Flaubert
- “Travel brings power and love back into your life” – Jalaluddin Rumi
- “I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be” – Ernesto Che Guevara
- “There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed” – Kate Douglas Wiggin
- “Travel is like a giant blank canvas, and the painting on the canvas is only limited by one’s imagination” – Ross Morley
- “When overseas you learn more about your own country, than you do the place you’re visiting” – Clint Borgen
- “Since life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better” – Simon Raven
- “Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport” – Unknown
- “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends” – Shirley MacLaine
- “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
- “Strong and content I will travel the open road” – Walt Whitman
- “It is not down in any map; true places never are” – Herman Melville
- “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end” – Ursula K. Le Guin
- “A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable” – Ryszard Kapuscinski
- “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before” – Unknown
- “With age comes wisdom. With travel comes understanding” – Sandra Lake
- “It is not the destination where you end up but the mishaps and memories you create along the way” – Penelope Riley
- “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world” – Mary Anne Radmacher
- “Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler… Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected” – Roman Payne
- “I travel for the great stories now ready tell, and those waiting to be told” – Carew Papritz
- “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else” – Tennessee Williams
- “You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world” – William Hazlitt
- “Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience” – Francis Bacon
- “He who is outside his door already has the hardest part of his journey behind him” – Dutch Proverb
- “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else” – Lawrence Block
- “Without new experience, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken” – Frank Herbert
- “The journey is greater than the destination” – Rick Riordan
- “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” – Lilian E. Smith
- “Travel, leave everything, copy the birds” – Gustave Flaubert
- “I fall asleep thinking there is no better elixir than travel. Old things always bored me, boredom always scared me, while travel—travel is a carnival of wild affairs” – Carol Vorvain
- “We take to the breeze, we go as we please” – E.B. White
- “A girl who travels will need someone that questions her, not too little, and not too much. She’ll need someone to read her, but also really listen to her. Because she’ll want to do the same. She’ll want a person that shares an interest but at the same time stays genuine to who they are” – Lauren Klarfeld
- “Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices” – Oscar Wilde
- “Travel makes me feel like a bird, travel gives me a sense of freedom, travel makes me come alive” – Archana Kapoor
- “Sometimes you do not need a particular destination to go, you just need a travel; the place you want to go is the travel itself” – Mehmet Murat Ildan
- “Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen” – Benjamin Disraeli
- “Traveling solo is an incredible – life changing – journey, which I can recommend anyone to undertake. It’s the fear of being alone that prevents many people from daring to take the step to go on that journey. But as with many things, within that fear you’ll discover the greatest triumphs” – Jellis Vaes
- “Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet’s blurred reality” – Andrew Solomon
- “An airport is a potent place, a point of reunions and departures. For the traveler, it’s a crossroads at the moment of decision, a flashpoint that separates intention from retreat” – Ginger Bensman
- “If you don’t learn to travel comfortably alongside your fear, then you’ll never be able to go anywhere interesting or do anything interesting” – Elizabeth Gilbert
- “Time is short. Take time to travel” – Barbara Olson
- “Although I deeply love oceans, deserts and other wild landscapes, it is only mountains that beckon me with that sort of painful magnetic pull to walk deeper and deeper into their beauty. They keep me continuously wanting to know more, feel more, see more” – Victoria Erickson
- “…and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there” – Jack Kerouac
- “In new surroundings, one grows new eyes” – Marty Rubin
- “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
- “Every spot on earth is particular, detailed, and incomprehensibly complex” – Jane Smiley
- “The one who doesn’t travel, does not live” – Petar II Petrovic Njegos
- “Travel is life-changing. That’s the promise made by a thousand websites and magazines, by philosophers and writers down the ages. Mark Twain said it was fatal to prejudice, and Thomas Jefferson said it made you wise. Anais Nin observed that “we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” It’s all true. Self-transformation is what I sought and what I found” – Elisabeth Eaves
- “Every journey brings you back home and to yourself” – Marty Rubin
- “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world” – Gustave Flaubert
- “Investment in travel is an investment in yourself” – Matthew Karsten
- “When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back” – Rebecca Solnt
- “One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm” – Ella Millart
- “Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it” – Eudora Welty
- “There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave” – Charlotte Eriksson
- “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories” – Ray Bradbury
- “The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries” – Rolf Potts
- “She is free in her wildness, she is a wanderess, a drop of free water” – Roman Payne
- “The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are” – Samuel Johnson
- “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing” – Helen Keller
- “There’s a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we’ve left it” – Colum McCann
- “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes” – Marcel Proust
- “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground” – Judith Thurman
- “Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere” – Isabelle Eberhardt
There you have it! I know that as I continue to read and search for more inspiration, I will likely be adding to this list over time. Feel free to let me know if I’ve introduced you to a new favourite quote. Or perhaps I have missed one of your favourtes, in which case feel free to comment below! All photos to accompany the wonderful quotes were taken by me during my travels.
– Lisa (LaDolceLisa)
ladolcelisa 
One reply on “The Best Travel Quotes”
Awesome post! These quotes are beautiful.