60 Quotes to Inspire You to Travel the World
Each year, Shea and I make it a point to visit three new places we’ve never been before, whether local or abroad. Many people think traveling and vacations are meant as an escape from reality, but it’s quite the opposite. Travel does something deep down to our core. It changes us for the better by opening our eyes to new cultures and experiences. It helps us meet new friends and learn more about ourselves. It provides us those moments of peace and clarity we so desperately crave at our day jobs. And it always leaves us wanting more, because we are meant for more.
So we’ve put together 60 of our favorite quotes to cure that serious case of wanderlust, encourage you to take chances, and inspire you to pack your bags and travel the world.
- “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
- “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
- “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” – Helen Keller
- “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that 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
- “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac
- “Live your life by a compass not a clock.” – Stephen Covey
- “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” – David Mitchell
- “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
- “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
- “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag
- “Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.” – Saber Ben Hassen
- “Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.” – Jack Kerouac
- “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.” – Cheryl Strayed
- “To those who stay put, the world is but an imaginary place. But to the movers, the makers, and the shakers, the world is all around, an endless invitation.” – Unknown
- “It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed, is you.” – Eric Roth
- “So much of who we are is where we have been.” – William Langewiesche
- “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine – it’s lethal.” – Paulo Coelho
- “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
- “We travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us.” – Unknown
- “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
- “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien
- “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
- “Traveling. It leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta
- “If you’re 22, 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
- “The more I traveled the more I realized fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” – Shirley Maclaine
- “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” – Unknown
- “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
- “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
- “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
- “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
- “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
- “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” – John A. Shedd
- “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
- “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” – James Michener
- “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
- “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” – Pico Iyer
- “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” – Buddha
- “So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. 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.” – Jon Krakauer
- “I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment.” – John Steinbeck
- “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
- “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.” – Cesare Pavese
- “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
- “Of all the paths you take in life, make sure a few of them are dirt.” – John Muir
- “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
- “Every exit is an entry somewhere else.” – Tom Stoppard
- “Take only memories, leave only footprints.” – Chief Seattle
- “NOT I – NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself.” – Walt Whitman
- “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.” – Agnes Repplier
- “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough.” – Toni Morrison
- “If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” – Rachel Wolchin
- “In order to be lost, I’d have to know where it is I’m going.” – Unknown
- “You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” – Miriam Adeney
- “And at the end of the day, your feet should be dirty, your hair messy and your eyes sparkling.” – Shanti
- “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
- “Travel brings power and love back to your life.” – Rumi
- “To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.” – Walter Mitty
- “I still believe in paradise. But now at least I know it’s not some place you can look for. Because it’s not where you go. It’s how you feel for a moment in your life when you’re a part of something. And if you find that moment… It lasts forever.” – The Beach
- “If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.” – John D. Rockefeller
- “She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city.” – Roman Payne
- “Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.” – Frank Borman
Thanks for reading! If we missed one of your favorite travel quotes, or even a quote that simply inspires you to live your best life, we’d love if you could leave it in the comments below. We’re always looking for more inspiration.
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