124 Inspirational Travel Quotes That'll Make You Want to Travel in 2022 (2024)

This is the ultimate list of inspirational travel quotes. Let wordsmiths such as Stephen King, Mark Twain and the Dalai Lama transport you around the world from your armchair.

Not all inspirational travel quotes are created equal. “You have to look through the rain to see the rainbow.” Ugh! Case and point. With so many of these clichés flying around, we forget the real purpose of an inspirational quote. The best travel quotes are meant to inspire. To resonate with and encourage you to take action.

Whether you’re stuck in a rut, hungry for change and adventure, lacking motivation or self-confidence, the right inspirational quote can give you a well-needed kick up the butt to get you on the right track towards achieving your goals

My favourite kind of inspirational quotes is travel related, obviously! They remind me that following my dreams will always lead to happiness and fulfilment. So, I’ve collated a rather epic list of not just any inspirational travel quotes, but the best travel quotes. Many of these travel quotes describe wanderlust perfectly. You’re going to love them!

There’s a mix of short travel quotes, some would even make perfect travel captions for Instagram, some are funny quotes about travelling with friends, but most of all they are all awesome trip quotes.

Ok, so the length of this list is probably a little overkill, but they are all beautiful travel quotes from some really inspiring authors and legends including Stephen King, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Samuel Johnson, John Steinbeck, Lao Tzu, Euripides, Seneca, Dalai Lama, Bill Bryson, T.S Eliot, Oscar Wilde and so so many more.

Here is the ultimate travel quotes list and the only one you’ll ever need. Save and Pin your favourites.

1. You need not even listen, just wait…the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself. – Franz Kafka

2. We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment. – Hilaire Belloc

3. 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. – Jawaharial Nehru

4. Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. – Gustave Flaubert

5. Travel expands the mind and fills the gap. – Sheda Savage

6. Time flies. It’s up to you to be the navigator. – Robert Orben

7. The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper. – W.B. Yeats

8. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust

9. The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams. – Oprah Winfrey

10. Take the time to put the camera away and gaze in wonder at what’s there in front of you. – Erick Widman

11. May your adventures bring you closer together, even as they take you far away from home. – Trenton Lee Stewart

12. Living on Earth is expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun every year. – Unknown

13. It doesn’t matter where you are. You are nowhere compared to where you can go. – Bob Proctor

14. If we travel simply to indulge ourselves we are missing some of the greatest lessons life has to offer. – Unknown

15. It is probably a pity that every citizen of each state cannot visit all the others, to see the differences, to learn what we have in common, and come back with a richer, fuller understanding of America – in all its beauty, in all its dignity, in all its strength, in support of moral principles. – Dwight D. Eisenhower

16. Travelling tends to magnify all human emotions – Peter Hoeg

17. When a man is a traveller, the world is his house and the sky is his roof, where he hangs his hat is his home, and all the people are his family.- Drew Bundini Brown

18. ‘I’m bored’ is a useless thing to say. You live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen non-percent of. – Louis C.K.

19. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list. – Susan Sontag

20. Wise as you have become, with so much experience, you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean. – Constantine Cavafy

21. Travel not to escape life, but so life doesn’t escape you. – Unknown

22. Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt. – Anthony Bourdain

23. To see the world, things dangerous to come to. To see behind the walls, draw closer. To find each other. And to feel. That is the purpose of life. – The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

24. 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

25. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist. – Oscar Wilde

26. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.- Ralph Waldo Emerson

27. This is your planet. You really should come see it sometime. – G Adventures

28. There is freedom waiting for you, on the breezes of the sky. And you ask “What if I fall?” Oh but my darling, what if you fly? – Erin Hanson

29. The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see. – G.K. Chesterton

30. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. – Albert Einstein

31 .The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart. – Helen Keller

32. Still round the corner, there may wait, a new road or a secret gate. – J. R. R. Tolkien

33. Paris is always a good idea. – Audrey Hepburn

34. Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn

35. Our footprints always follow us on days when it’s been snowing. They always show us where we’ve been, but never where we’re going. – Winnie the Pooh

36. 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.

37. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before. – Dalai Lama

38. Nothing lasts forever, except the day before you start your vacation. – Gayland Anderson

39. Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments and places that take our breath away – Unknown

40. It is a big and beautiful world. Most of us live and die in the same corner where we were born and never get to see any of it. I don’t want to be most of us. – Oberyn Martell, Game of Thrones

41. If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast. – Hemingway

42. If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet. – Anon

43. I’m not lost, I’ve just temporarily lost sight of my destination. – Unknown

44. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. – Oscar Wilde

45. I love to travel, but hate to arrive. – Albert Einstein

46. I am not the same having seen the moon shine from the other side of the world. – Mary Anne Radmacher

47. How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world I never knew? – Ernesto Che Guevara.

48. Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves. – Euripides

49. A year from now, you will wish you had started today. – Karen Lamb

50. A river cuts through rock not because of its power, but its persistence. – Jim Watkins

51. 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

52. 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

53. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect. – Paul Theroux

54. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art. – Freya Stark

55. To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries. – Aldous Huxley

56. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust

57. The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it. – Rudyard Kipling

58. Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves. – Henry David Thoreau

59. I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within. – Lillian Smith

60. I have worn the dust of many foreign streets, but to brush it off would surely be a crime. I have the memories of many foreign adventures, but to forget them, would surely be a sin. So, breath in the dust, and keep the memories in. – Rowland Waring-Flood

61. I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question. – Harun Yahya.

62. 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

63. A wise traveler never despises his own country. – Carlo Goldoni

64. A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not why ships were built – John A. Shedd

65. 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

66. 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 colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. – Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

67. When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. – D. H. Lawrence

68. 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 where riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and to fall in love once more. – Pico Iyer, Why we Travel

69. We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time. – T. S. Eliot

70. 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. – Jawaharial Nehru

71. Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe. – Anatole France

72. Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference. – Robert Frost

73. 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 harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain

74. Trust me, it’s paradise. This is where the hungry come to feed. For mine is a generation that circles the globe and searches for something we haven’t tried before. So never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite and never outstay the welcome. Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience. And if it hurts, you know what? It’s probably worth it. – Richard, ‘The Beach’ (Alex Garland)

75. Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort 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

76. 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

77. Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind. – Seneca

78. Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going. – Paul Theroux

79. Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation. – Elizabeth Drew

80. 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

81. 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

82. To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. – Freya Stark

83. There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it. – Charles Dudley Warner

84. There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. – Robert Louis Stevenson

85. The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. – St. Augustine

86. 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

87. The journey, not the arrival matters. – T. S. Eliot

88. Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘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

89. To travel is to live. – Hans Christian Anderson

90. So much of who we are is where we have been. – William Langewiesche

91. Somewhere on your journey don’t forget to turn around and enjoy the view. – Unknown

92. There are no shortcuts to any place worth going. – Beverly Sills

93. 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

94. People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home. – Dagobert D. Runes

95. Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled. – Mohammed

96. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life. – Jack Kerouac

97. One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things. – Henry Miller

98. 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

99. Not all those who wander are lost. – J. R. R. Tolkien

100. No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. – Lin Yutang

101. Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life. – Dolly Parton

102. Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore. – Andre Gide.

103. Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen. – Benjamin Disraeli

104. Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, “Wow! What a Ride!” – Hunter S. Thompson

105. Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures. – Lovelle Drachman.

106. If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home. – James Michener

107. I want to shake off the dust of this one-horse town. I want to explore the world. I want to watch TV in a different time zone. I want to visit strange, exotic malls. – Homer Simpson

108. 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

109. I am not born for one corner; the whole world is my native land. – Seneca

110. He who does not travel does not know the value of men. – Moorish proverb

111. Travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer!

112. 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

113. Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

114. All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it. – Samuel Johnson

115. All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time. – Paul Fussell

115. All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. – Martin Buber

116. A traveler without observation is a bird without wings. – Moslih Eddin Saadi

117. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. – Lao Tzu

118. A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. – John Steinbeck

119. A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles. – Tim Cahill

120. A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving. – Lao Tzu

121. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. – Mark Twain

122. You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place. – Miriam Adeney

123. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. – G. K. Chesterton

124. Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown. – Gaby Basora

We made it! I spent waaay to many hours in photoshop bringing together this post on the best travel quotes. What did you think? I would love to hear your comments. Want more? Then you’re going to love my list of travel words that describe wanderlust perfect.

If you’re learning a language, then you’ll love these inspirational language quotes.

Over to you!

Which of these travel quotes are your favourites? Did I miss any? What else would you add?
Let me know using the comments section below or join me on social media to start a conversation.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this post.

Like what you see? Subscribe using the form below to have all of my posts delivered directly to your email.