I love travel quotes. I love discovering the perfect ways others have summed up my feelings for this incredible thing I get to do with my life. I sprinkle them across my Instagram captions, as a sign-off on my monthly newsletters and send them to various people when they need a dose of inspiration.
I continue to add to this list all the time; it was most recently updated on January 21, 2022.
Here's my current favourite collection of quotes gathered from across the interweb:
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)
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)
Roy's Peak, Wanaka, New Zealand
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)
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)
The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.
- Aaron Lauritsen, Canadian author (b. unknown)
Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada
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)
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)
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)
Komodo National Park, Indonesia
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)
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)
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)
Wayalailai Island, Fiji
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)
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)
Santuario Cristo do Rei viewpoint, Lisbon, Portugal
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)
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)
Hi! I’m Jana, a British-Dutch-Canadian with a dream of seeing every country in the world. I am a storyteller, photographer and adventurer passionate about documenting and sharing my travels.
