Whether you’re a world explorer or an armchair traveler, we’ve got the best travel quotes around to motivate you.
Some of these quotes for travelers are funny, while others are profound. But all these traveler quotes are great.
Here is our curated list of the best travel quotes around:
Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
Jack Kerouac
I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.
Neil Gaiman
This next quote on travel is the reason Dauntless Jaunter exists:
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
Mark Twain
See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.
Ray Bradbury
Here’s an Anthony Bourdain quote about travel, and it’s never been more relevant:
If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.
Anthony Bourdain
Not all those who wander are lost.
J.R.R. Tolkien
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.
Ma Jian
I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.
Roman Payne
Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
David Mitchell
Read next: Ready to take your next trip? Here are the travel goddesses, gods, and other deities you might pray to (back in the day, at least).
To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world.
Freya Stark
So true!
This next one is a great Bill Bryson quote on travel. This guy has amazing insights and the talent to write them down in a most creative way:
But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
Bill Bryson
Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
Gustave Flaubert
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
Saint Augustine
I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.
Melody Truong
People don’t take trips, trips take people.
John Steinbeck
The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.
G.K. Chesterton
I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
Susan Sontag
Same for me!
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 am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
Mary Anne Radmacher
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
This Neil Gaiman quote on travel is one of my favorites from one of my favorite authors alive:
Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.
Neil Gaiman
Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.
Ryu Murakami
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
Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.
Joe Abercrombie
And there’s never enough Bourdain. Here’s another great Anthony Bourdain travel quote:
If you’re twenty-two, 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
Read next: A good traveler would understand the differences between race and ethnicity to be tactful wherever they go!
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.
Lin Yutang
We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
Anaïs Nin
… there ain’t no journey what don’t change you some.
David Mitchell
People don’t take trips—trips take people.
John Steinbeck
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.
Mark Twain
Explore, dream, discover – that’s powerful AF.
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.
Gustave Flaubert
Paul Theroux is considered to be one of the greatest travel writers ever, but he does like to complain a lot:
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Paul Theroux
You can’t understand a city without using its public transportation system.
Erol Ozan
Read next: Want to be a good traveler? Remember as you travel that you are an ambassador.
Here are a couple of funny travel quotes some of you will find super pertinent:
There are two kinds of travel: first class and with children.
Robert Benchley
Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.
George Carlin
You know how it is. Sometimes we plan a trip to one place, but something takes us to another.
Rumi
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.
Anthony Doerr
If you need to reset or reinvigorate your life, travel!
My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine
Here’s another funny travel quote:
He won’t fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won’t fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation.
Spalding Gray
A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.
Tim Cahill
Read next: It’s great to travel with friends, but here are some rules for traveling in a group so you don’t return hating each other!
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Lao Tzu
There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.
Charles Dudley Warner
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
A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
Lao Tzu
Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.
Anita Desai
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
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
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
Read next: Check out our travel guides to plan your next trip!
Well, that’s our roundup of the greatest travel quotes of all time. Got any feedback, questions, or another amazing travel quote to add to our list? Let us know in the comments below, and thanks for reading!
