Travel quotes are a mixed bag for me. I love them, for they inspire wanderlust, but I already have that in spades. As Mr. TLT likes to say, my travel eyes are bigger than my travel stomach.
Still, I’m drawn to elegant turns of phrase, amusing insights, pithy anecdotes. I’ve had a Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations on my desk for thirty-some years. They inspire me not just as a traveler, not just as a writer, but often as a human being.
Travel enriches your life. The more you see, the more people you encounter, the more wonders you witness, the more open and well-rounded you are. Travel encourages humanity.
I’ve collected one hundred travel quotes, and will likely add more as I come across more that inspire me. Bookmark this page and return to it any time you need a little inspiration.
Inspirational Travel Quotes to Inspire Wanderlust
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
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
Make voyages! Attempt them! There’s nothing else.
Tennessee Williams, Camino Real
I guess the lesson is you can’t go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.
Charles Finch
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
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
Andre Gide
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck
One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.
Henry Miller
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.
Jawaharlal Nehru
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.
Lawrence Block
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
Freya Stark
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
Martin Buber
There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar; it keeps the mind nimble; it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.
George Santayana
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
G.K. Chesterton
Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.
Benjamin Disraeli
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
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
The journey itself is home.
Bashō Matsuo
Since life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.
Simon Raven
I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.
Anthony Bourdain
So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry.
Jack Kerouac
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
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.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.’s Mom
I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.
Paulo Coelho
Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.
Greg Anderson
Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Aldous Huxley
All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost.
JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Cesare Paves
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Robert Louis Stevenson
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.
Anais Nin
When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.
Catherynne M. Valente
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Lao Tzu
To travel is to live.
Hans Christian Andersen
I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Travellers understand, instinctively and by experience, that travel and adventure change and elongate time, even while navigating the deadlines of airline and train departures.
Paul Sheehan
Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.
Nicolas Bouvier
Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone’s home and backyard.
Vera Nazarian
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
I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find 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
When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let somebody else figure it out.
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.
Anthony Bourdain
You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.
Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star
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
You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.
Ella Maillart
The most dangerous worldviews are the worldviews of those who have never viewed the world.
Aldous Huxley
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Jack Kerouac
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
Mary Anne Radmacher
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
John Steinbeck
Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.
Erol Ozan
Adventure begins with a thought, decision and action.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.
Pico Iyer
Life is a magical journey, so travel endlessly to unfold its profound and heart touching beauty.
Debasish Mridha
I travel because I become uncomfortable being too comfortable.
Carew Papritz
Road Trips Quotes
Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.
Jack Kerouac
I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.
Walt Whitman
Never underestimate the therapeutic power of driving and listening to very loud music.
Unknown
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
Jack Kerouac
Road trips are the equivalent of human wings. Ask me to go on one, anywhere. We’ll stop in every small town and learn the history and stories, feel the ground and capture the spirit. Then we’ll turn it into our own story that will live inside our history
Victoria Erickson
Related: 50 Tips for Planning an AMAZING Road Trip
Road trips required a couple of things: a well-balanced diet of caffeine, salt and sugar and an excellent selection of tunes—oh, and directions.
Jenn McKinlay
Because the greatest part of a road trip isn’t arriving at your destination. It’s all the wild stuff that happens along the way.
Emma Chase
A road trip is a way for the whole family to spend time together and annoy each other in interesting new places.
Tom Lichtenheld
We all have that one friend who is either on a road-trip or planning a road-trip or thinking about a road-trip or talking to people who are on road-trip or posting quotes about road-trip.
Crestless Wave
The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.
Aaron Lauritsen
I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw the sense of time out the window.
Miriam Toews
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
Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn’t mean to take.
Angela N. Blount
That’s why I love road trips, dude. It’s like doing something without actually doing anything.
John Green
All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.
Jack Kerouac
You can be writing every day. When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.
Steve Rushin
Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
Rebecca Solnit
What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do – especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
William Least Heat Moon
The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
William Least Heat Moon
Look for chances to take the less-traveled roads. There are no wrong turns.
Susan Magsamen
Like these travel quotes? You might also like quotes about Chicago.
You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
William Hazlitt
The road is there, it will always be there. You just have to decide when to take it.
Chris Humphrey
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.
Izaak Walton
You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.
Charles Kuralt
Quotes about Nature
In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks.
John Muir
Leave the road, take the trails.
Pythagoras
A great many people, and more all the time, live their entire lives without ever once sleeping out under the stars.
Alan S. Kesselheim
In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.
Alice Walker
I just want to live in a world of mountains, coffee, campfires, cabins, and golden trees, and run around with a camera and notebook, learning the inner workings of everything real.
Victoria Erickson
To be whole. To be complete. Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from.
Terry Tempest Williams
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
Albert Einstein
I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my sense put in order.
John Burroughs
We can never have enough of nature.
Henry David Thoreau
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
They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.
Bill Bryson
I don’t think any other holiday embraces the food of the Midwest quite like Thanksgiving.
Michael Symon
Quotes about National Parks
There is nothing so American as our national parks…. The fundamental idea behind the parks…is that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Our National Parks belong to each of us, and they are natural places to learn, exercise, volunteer, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy the magnificent beauty of our great land.
George W. Bush
Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity.
John Muir
The mountains are calling and I must go.
John Muir
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
And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.
John Muir
Every forest branch moves differently in the breeze, but as they sway they connect at the roots.
Rumi
The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau
Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.
Sarah Kay
At the beach, life is different. Time doesn’t move hour to hour but mood to moment. We live by the currents, plan by the tides and follow the sun.
Sandy Gingras