Quotes

101 Memorable Travel Quotes

Reykjavik, Iceland

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

2. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

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

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

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

6. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain

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

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

9. “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

10. “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

11. ″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

12. “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

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

14. “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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

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

21. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

22. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

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

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

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

26. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

27. “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

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

29. “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

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

31. “Like all great travelers, 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. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew

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

35. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

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

37. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

38. “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

39. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

41. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

42. “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

43. “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

44. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” – Carlo Goldoni

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

49. “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

50. “Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover / Breath’s aware that will not keep. / Up, lad: when the journey’s over there’ll be time enough to sleep.” – A. E. Housman

51. “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

52. “Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.” – Louis L’Amour

53. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Fitzhugh Mullan

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

55. Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin

56. “Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.” – Nikos Kazantzakis

57. “Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.” – Blaise Pascal

58. “It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be.” – Selma Lager

59. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman

60. “One main factor in the upward trend of animal life has been the power of wandering.” – Alfred North Whitehead

61. “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon

62. “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” – The Dhammapada

63. “Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” – George Eliot

64. “Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see.” – Samuel Johnson

65. “An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.” – Iain Sinclair

66. “Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’” – Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

67. “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” – Alan Keightley

68. “Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.” – Ray Bradbury

69. “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut

70. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” – Hilaire Belloc

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

72. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” – Mohammed

73. “One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.” – Charles Dickens

74. “When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.” – Edward Dahlberg

75. “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” – Frank Herbert

76. “A child on a farm sees a plane fly overhead and dreams of a faraway place. A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse… and thinks of home.” – Carl Burns

77. “I love to travel, but hate to arrive.” – Albert Einstein

78. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance.” – Anonymous

79. “Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers… seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns.” – Paul Fussell

80. “Most of my treasured memories of travel are recollections of sitting.” – Robert Thomas Allen

81. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did now know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” – Italo Calvino

82. “He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all.” – Sinclair Lewis

83. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” - Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

84. “Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.” – John Muir

85. “When you’re traveling, ask the traveler for advice / not someone whose lameness keeps him in one place.” – Rumi

86. “When you are everywhere, you are nowhere / When you are somewhere, you are everywhere.” – Rumi

87. “There are only two emotions in a plane: boredom and terror.” – Orson Welles

88. “To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.” – Sam Keen

89. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G. K. Chesterton

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

91. “The autumn leaves are falling like rain / Although my neighbors are all barbarians / And you, you are a thousand miles away / There are always two cups at my table.” – T’ang dynasty poem

92. “People don’t take trips – trips take people.” – John Steinbeck

93. “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

94. “It’s a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal.” – Tom Waits

95. “The map is not the territory.” – Alfred Korzybski

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

97. “It is solved by walking.” – Algerian proverb

98. “He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de Saint Exupéry

99. “What am I doing here?” – Arthur Rimbaud

100. “I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterward at home.” – William Hazlitt

101. “Travel is pretty darn neat.” - The Brooklyn Nomad (Okay I think I need to work on this quote thing.)