52 Memorable Travel Quotes

Travel Quotes to Inspire Your Next Adventure

1. We need only travel enough to give our intellects an airing. –Henry David Thoreau

2. Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel’s immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with the experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we have believed to be the right and only way. — Ralph Crawshaw

3. In America there are two classes of travel: first class and with children. –Robert Benchley

4. “I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” — Robert Frost

5. The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space, at full speed, above all obstacles, on the infinite highway of the air.
– Wilbur Wright

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

7. I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two is this — we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment. –Hilaire Belloc

8. 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

9. Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything. –Charles Kuralt

10. Certainly, 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

11. The saying “Getting there is half the fun” became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines. –Henry J. Tillman

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

13. Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can. –Bill Bryson

14. There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find how you yourself have altered. –Nelson Mandela

15. Wherever you go, go with all your heart. –Confucius

16. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. –Robert Louis Stevenson

17. Your true traveller 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

18. As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own. –Margaret Mead

19. The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page. –St. Augustine

20. When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money. –Susan Heller

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

22. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing.” –Daniel J. Boorstin

23. It is not down in any map; true places never are. –Herman Melville

24. And that’s the wonderful thing about family travel: it provides you with experiences that will remain locked forever in the scar tissue of your mind. –Dave Barry

25. Travelers never think that they are the foreigners –Mason Cooley

26. Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness. –Ray Bradbury

27. 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

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

29. I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine. –Caskie Stinnett

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

31. Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen. –Benjamin Disraeli

32. 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

33. We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. –Anais Nin

34. The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know. –Loren Eiseley

35. If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, un-forgiveness, selfishness, and fears. –Glenn Clark

36. Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time. –Jerzy Kosinski

37. Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name. –Alice Meyne

38. We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own. –Maria Mitchell

39. One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more. –Thomas Jefferson

40. Who lives see, who travels see more. –Arabian proverb

41. “I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

42. “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(Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe)

43. “Never travel faster than your guardian angel can fly.” – Mother Teresa

44. “Going slowly [...] was the best way of being reminded that there is a relationship between Here and There, and that travel narrative was the story of There and Back.” ” – Paul Theroux

45. “All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows.”
- Nikos Kazantzakis (Report to Greco)

46. It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

47. The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot

48. Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?” — Erma Bombeck

49. “The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying ‘anywhere but here’.” – e.e. cummings

50. we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” — Anaïs Nin

51. “I took the road less traveled…where the heck am I?” — Brant Randall

52. “What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.” – Louise Glück

Another list you might like to check out is 52 Travel Books Worth a Read.

Is your favorite travel quote on the list? If not, leave your picks in the comments! We’d love to hear from you.