Travel Quotes

I’ve been putting together some of my favorite inspirational travel quotes as I continue to travel the world and experience new places and things abroad.

What follows is a complete collection of the best travel quotes, complete with adventure travel quotes from famous figures like Mark Twain and Anthony Bourdain.

Warning: some of these quotes may give you the travel itch! In any case, I hope you’ll find some of these short travel quotes inspirational for your own journey!

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. — Unknown
Take only memories, leave only footprints. — Unknown
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. — Gustave Flaubert
Every man dies, but not every man really lives. — William Wallace
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. — Oscar Wilde
Life is a journey. Make the most of it. — Unknown
Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer. — Unknown
Collect moments, not things. — Unknown
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. — Unknown
The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. — Lao Tzu
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 Andersen
I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. — Robert Frost
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one’s lifetime. – Mark Twain
To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else — these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Lifetimes of ecstasy crowded into a single moment. – Mark Twain

It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. – Anthony Bourdain
Maybe that’s enlightenment enough – to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go. – Anthony Bourdain
I think food, culture, people and landscape are all absolutely inseparable. – Anthony Bourdain
I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafiya nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. – Anthony Bourdain
I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies. – Anthony Bourdain
Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund. – Anthony Bourdain
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
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

It’s a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any. — Hugh Laurie
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
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
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
Be careful because Cambodia is the most dangerous place you will ever visit. You will fall in love with it, and eventually it will break your heart. — Joel Brinkley
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. — Freya Stark
I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses. — Bill Bryson
The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home. — Freya Stark
When you’ve managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown – either through the misdirection of others, or better yet, through your own creative ineptitude – there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when we are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free. — Tim Cahill
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. — Lin Yutang
He travels the fastest who travels alone. — Rudyard Kipling
Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection. — Lawrence Durrell
When the traveler goes alone he gets acquainted with himself. — Liberty Hyde Bailey
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. — Henry David Thoreau
I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more. — Thomas Jefferson
Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time. — Hannah Arendt

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
A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. — Tim Cahill
You will never be completely at 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
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson
If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal. — Paulo Coelho
Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis. — Tim Cahill
Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. — Edward Abbey
Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless.
We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. — John Steinbeck
What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies. — Jack Kerouac
A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are for. — J.A. Shedd

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
Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before. — Unknown
Better to see something once than hear about it a thousand times. — Asian Proverb
Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. — Ibn Battutah
One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm. — Ella Maillart
Half the fun of travel is the esthetic of lostness. — Ray Bradbury
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. — Neale Donald Walsh
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. — Unknown
A great way to learn about your country is to leave it. — Henry Rollins
Live your life by a compass, not a clock. — Stephen Covey
Some experiences simply do not translate, you have to go to know. — Kobi Yamada
I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world. — Mary Anne Radmacher
Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage. — Paulo Coelho
Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost. — Erol Ozan
Travel far enough, you meet yourself. — David Mitchell
The journey itself is my home. — Matsuo Basho
Live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry. — Jack Kerouac
The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. — Guillermo del Toro
A good traveler leaves no tracks. — Lao Tzu
It’s in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the Earth people who make you feel right at home. — Aaron Lauritsen

Personally I like going places where I don’t speak the language, don’t know anybody, don’t know my way around and don’t have any delusions that I’m in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home. — Michael Mewshaw
I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads. — Paulo Coelho
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
Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt. – Anthony Bourdain
It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. – Anthony Bourdain
For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there — with your eyes open — and lived to see it. – Anthony Bourdain
Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown. – Anthony Bourdain
I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find the perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary. – Anthony Bourdain
Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? … I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once. – Anthony Bourdain

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all. — Helen Keller
Never let your memories be greater than your dreams. — Douglas Ivester
Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear. — George Adair
Wherever you go, go with all your heart. — Unknown
I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. — Henry Rollins
Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in an office or mowing your lawn. Climb that damn mountain. — Jack Kerouac
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
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
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
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
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
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