Who doesn’t love a good travel quote? Whether you need it for inspiration, motivation, or even an instagram caption, there’s something about a string of words that captures the intensity of travel in all its many flavors we can’t seem to get enough of.
After mourning a lack of travel throughout the pandemic, I have found some solace in these quotes below and wanted to share them in hopes that they might lift your spirits or shift your perspectives as they have for me.
You’ll find a few quotes which mean a lot to me personally, some that are so well known you could probably quote them by memory, and some which are guides on how to travel better and love our earth more deeply. Even a couple quotes from interviews I’ve done with women who love to travel.
General Travel Quotes
“Nothing ever becomes real ‘til it is experienced.” – John Keats
“We derive strength, motivation and purpose not only for one another but through one another.” – Jennifer Moray, Owner of NINAKURU
“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” – Anita Desai
“Often, bumpy roads lead to beautiful places.” – Dave Martinez
“People don’t take trips, trips take people.” – John Steinbeck
“One of the gladdest moments of human life, me thinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.” –Sir Richard Burton
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that 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.” –H. Jackson Brown Jr.
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” –Saint Augustine
“Your feet will take you where your heart is.” –Irish proverb
“And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, in dimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” — Pico Iyer
“Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures.”– Lewis Carroll
“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all the familiar comforts 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
“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
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
“The thing about tourism is that the reality of a place is quite different from the mythology of it.” – Martin Parr
Read this next: What is Sustainable Travel? The Essentials You Need to Know
On sustainability & how to travel better
“To plunge into another life, to understand people of another culture, you need to live peacefully in the same rhythm with them, and not to run around tourist sites with a guide and a camera.” – Vera
“Take only memories, leave only footprints.” – Attributed to Chief Seattle
“Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in 10 seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” –Ray Bradbury
“When you travel with children you are giving something that can never be taken away… experience, exposure, and a way of life.” –Pamela T. Chandler
“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 you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” – James Michener
“Plans to protect air and water, wilderness and wildlife are in fact plans to protect man.” – Stewart Udall
“Look after the land and the land will look after you, destroy the land and it will destroy you.” – Aboriginal Proverb
“A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” – Rachel Carson
“We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.” – Thomas Fuller
“The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it.” – Robert Swan
“Sustainable development is that which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” – Gro Harlem Brundtland
“For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.” – Jacques-Yves Cousteau
“Time spent amongst trees is never wasted time.” – Katrina Mayer
“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” ― Susan Heller
“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
“Let’s try to create a new habit of slow travel; let’s forfeit the social media selfies and work on creating true links of friendship, mutual aid, trust and discovery when we are guests in other people’s communities and homes.” ― Heather Marsh
Read this next: 6 Things I’m Taking Off My Bucket List
On the great outdoors
“All I want is to stand in a field and to smell green, to taste air, to feel the earth want me, without all this concrete hating me.” – Phillip Pulfrey
“When a man moves away from nature his heart becomes hard.” – Lakota Proverb
“The environment is where we all meet; where all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share.” – Lady Bird Johnson
“The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned to ask.” – Nancy Newhall
“The earth is what we all have in common.” Wendell Berry
“It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
On the personal transformation of travel
“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
“Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustav Flaubert
“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 (This is one that’s super near and dear to my heart because my dad sent it to me on one of my first solo trips.)
“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
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” –Marcel Proust
“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” –Anais Nin
“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” –Lin Yutang
“The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” — Shirley MacLaine
“Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.” ― Jodi Picoult
“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
“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ― Terry Pratchett
“Without stirring abroad, one can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window one can see the way of heaven. The further one goes the less one knows.” – Lao Tzu
“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
Are your favorite travel quotes included here? If I missed yours, drop it in the comments below!
Like this post? Save it for later!
