I have a wild love of words, and the exquisite way we can capture a feeling or store a memory using just 26 letters. So here, I have curated a collection of quotes I have discovered which so perfectly sum up my feelings for life. I hope some resonate with you.
I continue to add to this list all the time; it was most recently updated in June 2024.
It is not life that matters, but the journey.
- Paulo Coelho, Brazilian lyricist and author (b. 1947)
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, American author and historian (1876 - 1958)
The steward just asked me if I was not afraid to travel alone, and I said, "Why, it is life."
- Emily Hahn, American journalist and author (1905 - 1997)
A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.
- Roman Payne, American author and poet (b. 1977)
"You don't even know where I'm going." "I don't care. I'd like to go anywhere."
- John Steinbeck, American author (1902 - 1968)
Mount Cook National Park, New Zealand
If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it's lethal.
- Paul Coelho, Brazilian author (b. 1947)
I travel because it makes me realize how much I haven't seen, how much I'm not going to see, and how much I still need to see.
- Carew Papritz, American author (b. unknown)
So much of who we are is where we have been.
- William Langewiesche, American author, journalist and pilot (b. 1955)
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
- Gustav Flaubert, French author (1821 - 1880)
Traveling - it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
- Ibn Battuta, Moroccan scholar and explorer (1304 - 1377)
Cape Town, South Africa
Why travel? To be changed, and to be changed again and again.
- Carew Papritz, American author (b. unknown)
Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.
- Anita Desai, Indian author and professor (b. 1937)
To wander is to be alive.
- Roman Payne, American author and poet (b. 1977)
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
- J. R. R. Tolkien, English author and poet (1892 - 1973)
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
- Aristotle, Greek philosopher (384 BC - 322 BC)
Triglav National Park, Slovenia
The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.
- Aaron Lauritsen, Canadian author (b. unknown)
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has courage to lose sight of the shore.
- Andre Gide, French author (1869 - 1951)
"Do you always travel with such cumbersome books?" "I don't trust anyone who wouldn't."
- Doug Dorst, American author and writing instructor (b. unknown)
I travel because I become uncomfortable being too comfortable.
- Carew Papritz, American author (b. unknown)
I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
- Mary Anne Radmacher, American author (b. 1957)
Kastellorizo, Greece
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
- Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish author (1850 - 1894)
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, English comedian, actor, writer, travel documentarian and TV presenter (b. 1943)
Do you really want to look back on your life and see how wonderful it could have been had you not been afraid to live it?
- Caroline Myss, American author (b. 1952)
Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you've traveled.
- Muhammad, Arab religious leader (571 AD - 632 AD)
Our homes travel with us. They are wherever we feel loved and accepted.
- Kamand Kojouri, Iranian author (b. unknown)
Salzburg, Austria
Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.
- Freya Stark, British-Italian author (1893 - 1993)
I travel for the great stories now ready to tell, and those waiting to be told.
- Carew Papritz, American author (b. unknown)
A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.
- John Shedd, American author and professor (1859 - 1928)
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
- Aldous Huxley, English author and philosopher (1894 - 1963)
And then there is the most dangerous risk of all - the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.
- Randy Komisar, American author and venture capitalist (b. unknown)
Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures.
- Lewis Carroll, English author (1832 - 1898)
Fill your life with experiences, not things. Have stories to tell, not stuff to show.
- unknown
Not all those who wander are lost.
- J. R. R. Tolkien, English author and poet (1892 - 1973)
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, English author (1709 - 1784)
To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
- Freya Stark, British-Italian author (1893 - 1993)
Quito, Ecuador
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, British-American author (b. 1951)
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, American author (b. 1941)
The best part of traveling is finding yourself.
Ken Poirot, American author (b. 1971)
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.
- Gustav Flaubert, French author (1821 - 1880)
I travel not only for the passion and madness and desire of movement, but because travel, like bread and water and air, becomes necessary to a life fully dreamed and lived.
- Carew Papritz, American author (b. unknown)
Wahiba Sands, Oman
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, American author (b. 1934)
I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains.
- Henry David Thoreau, American author (1817 - 1862)
What it is to be a human being in a world full of possibility.
- Paulo Coelho, Brazilian lyricist and author (b. 1947)
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
- Martin Buber, Austrian-Israeli philosopher (1878 - 1965)
Absolute freedom does not exist; what does exist is the freedom to choose anything you like and then commit yourself to that decision.
- Paulo Coelho, Brazilian lyricist and author (b. 1947)
Sossusvlei, Namibia
It's a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same. Even smells the same. You realize what's changed is you.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, American author (1896 - 1940)
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, Swiss explorer (1877 - 1904)
The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.
- Giacomo Casanova, Italian adventurer and author (1725 - 1798)
If you want to find out who you really are, then go travel. To move is the thing.
- Nancy Horan, American author (b. unknown)
It takes leaving, doesn't it, to see things through fresh eyes.
- Nancy Horan, American author (b. unknown)
Lac Blanc, France
Personal growth lies within the unknown; courage permits you to explore this space.
- unknown
Is where you're from the place you're leaving or where you have roots?
- Sara Gruen, Canadian-American author (b. 1969)
The Milky Way is a flowing river of stars profoundly depthless.
- Peter Heller, American author (b. 1959)
We all have our time machines, don't we? Those that take us back are memories... And those that carry us forward, are dreams."
- H. G. Wells, English writer (1866 - 1946)
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
- Aleksander Hemon, Bosnian-American author (b. 1964)
Ao Nang, Thailand
Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves.
- Peter Heller, American author (b. 1959)
Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement.
- Peter Heller, American author (b. 1959)
The best thing about bravery is even a little is enough.
- Beau Taplin, Australian poet (b. 1988)
There is no perfection, only life.
- Milan Kundera, Czech-French novelist (1929 - 2023)
I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience posible in my life.
- Sylvia Plath, American poet and novelist (1932 - 1963)
Marrakech, Morocco
One of the most flattering things I have come to know is when someone tells me, "I am in love with the way you see the world." How sincerely beautiful it is for someone to simply say your eyes are art.
- Christopher Poindexter, American poet (b. 1991)
If I admire something about someone, I tell them. We humans are so fragile. It's important to give people their flowers while they are still here. Never admire quietly.
- Chimamanda Adichie, Nigerian writer and novelist (b. 1977)
Your time on Earth is limited. Don't try to "age with grace", age with mischief, audacity, and a good story to tell.
- Case Kenny, American writer (b. unknown)
I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.
The best way to know life is to love many things.
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch painter (153 - 1890)
Berchtesgaden National Park, Germany
Why else are we here if not to live with unreasonable passion for things.
- butterflies rising (b. unknown)
The next time you find yourself in a dark place, I would like you to step outside, gaze long and hard into the deep night, and find comfort in the understanding that the absence of light makes nothing in this universe any less astonishing or magic.
- Beau Taplin, Australian poet (b. 1988)
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet (1875 - 1926)
I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable, beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.
- Mary Oliver, American poet (1935 - 2019)
If there is ever a time I feel inconsolable, unloveable, unbalanced and imperfect, one deep breath of mountain air, one step outdoors towards the immovable, stoic and majestic irregularities of the earth, reminds me that it is the imperfections we find most unique and beautiful on this planet and perhaps we should remember to look upon ourselves with this same kindness and awe.
- Jana Meerman, British-Dutch-Canadian storyteller (b. 1996)
Malbun, Liechtenstein
But time, as well as healing all wounds, taught me something strange too: that it's possible to love more than one person in a lifetime... This however doesn't mean that I have to renounce all my past experiences, as long as I'm careful not to compare my two lives. You can't measure love the way you can the length of a road or the height of a building.
- Paulo Coelho, Brazilian lyricist and author (b. 1947)
The best way to know who we are is often to find out how others see us.
- Paulo Coelho, Brazilian lyricist and author (b. 1947)
"Do you always travel with such cumbersome books?" "I don't trust anyone who wouldn't."
- Doug Dorst, American author and writing instructor (b. unknown)
The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.
- Giacomo Casanova, Italian adventurer and author (1725 - 1798)
So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.
- Vincent Van Gogh, Dutch painter (153 - 1890)
i'm not going to pretend to be less intelligent than i am so a man can feel more comfortable around me the one i deserve will see my greatness and want to lift it higher
- Rupi Kaur, Canadian poet (b. 1992)
Madrid, Spain
