The following travel quotations inspire me in one way or another. Some of of these travel quotations have links to my travel blogs on associated subjects; and some are referred to in my travel blogs when relevant.
“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”
Susan Sontag
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.”
Rumi
Read: Finding a route over the mountains in Macedonia
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
Aldous Huxley
Read: Going back to the Murder Capital of 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
Read: A Decision at a Spanish Port
“Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before”
Dalai Lama
Read Reflections of a Locked-Down Digital Nomad
“I’d rather have a passport full of stamps than a house full of stuff.”
Unknown
“Travel has taught me to make time for serendipity”
Zachary Johnson
Read: Kidnapped in Mexico
“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 Terán
Read: A Decision at the Port
“Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untraveled minds.”
Charels Caleb Colton
“To me travel is triple delight: anticipation, performance, and recollection.”
Ilka Chase
Read Reflections of a Locked-Down Digital Nomad
“The wise traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.”
Lao Tze
Read: A Decision at the Port
“Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.”
Seneca
“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 taken for granted.”
Bill Bryson
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
Martin Buber
Read: A Decision at the Port
She asked me what travelling means to me.
Me: “Travel is meeting you”
Seen on a t-shirt on a trek in Sumatra, Indonesia
Read On an active volcano in Sumatra
“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
Read Marooned in the Solomon Islands
“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
Read: A Decision at the Port
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
“Serendipity was my tour guide, assisted by caprice”
Pico Iyer
Read: Kidnapped in Mexico
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
St Augustine
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
Paul Theroux
Read A run before dawn near the international dateline
“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Read The Great Little Tongatapu South Pacific Ocean Drive
“The journey not the arrival matters.”
T.S. Eliot
“People travel to far away places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.”
Dagobert D. Runes
“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. Alas, as we get up in life, and are more preoccupied with our affairs, even a holiday is a thing that must be worked for. To hold a pack upon a pack-saddle against a gale out of the freezing north is no high industry, but it is one that serves to occupy and compose the mind. And when the present is so exacting, who can annoy himself about the future?”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Read Observing Timor Leste without taking photos
“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
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
Lao Tzu
“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
Anita Desai
Read: A Decision at the Port
“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
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust
Read Observing Timor Leste without taking photos
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
Ursula K. Le Guin
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
G.K. Chesterton
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
Gustave Flaubert
“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
“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
Read The Great Little Tongatapu South Pacific Ocean Drive
No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
Lin Yutang
Read On an active volcano in Sumatra
“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
Henry Miller
Read Observing Timor Leste without taking photos
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
James Michener
“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.”
Lawrence Block
Read Kyoto in the Snow
“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
“He who would travel happily must travel light.”
Antoine de St. Exupery
Read Coming home in Beirut
Read: A Decision at the Port
“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
Tim Cahill
“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”
Benjamin Disraeli
“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
Read From Mount Errigal to the Blue Ocean
“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
Read Kyoto in the Snow
“Take only memories, leave only footprints.”
Chief Seattle
“I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.”
John Green
“Travel is ninety percent anticipation and ten percent recollection”
Edward Streeter
Read Reflections of a Locked-Down Digital Nomad
“Wherever you go, go with all your heart!”
Confucius
“A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.”
Henry Rollins
Read A Sense of Place
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Herman Melville
“You don’t have to be rich to travel well. ”
Eugene Fodor
“Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.”
Dalai Lama
Read Getting around the islands of Cape Verde
“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.”
Susan Heller
“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
“Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.”
Paolo Coelho
“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.”
Robert Frost
Read From Mount Errigal to the Blue Ocean
“Live your life by a compass, not a clock.”
Stephen Covey
“There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.”
Jack Kerouac
“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”
Paul Theroux
Read A lump in my throat in Alice Springs
“At its best, travel should challenge our preconceptions and most cherished views, cause us to rethink our assumptions, shake us a bit, make us broader minded and more understanding.”
Arthur Frommer
Read What I Learnt from a Birthday Party in Shanghai
Read Kyoto in the Snow
“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
David Mitchell
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
Freya Stark
“A ship in a harbor is safe, but it not what ships are build for.”
John A. Shedd
Read: A Decision at the Port
“Take every chance you get in life, because some things only happen once.”
Karen Gibbs
Read Kyoto in the Snow
“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.”
Oscar Wilde
“Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.”
Izaak Walton
Read Stranded in Saudi Arabia without a passport
Read The Great Little Tongatapu South Pacific Ocean Drive
“Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret”
Oscar Wilde
“I dislike feeling at home when I’m abroad.”
George Bernard Shaw
“A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.”
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.”
Henry David Thoreau
“For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.”
Aldous Huxley
“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled.”
Mohamed
Read What I Learnt from a Birthday Party in Shanghai
“I don’t know where I’m going from here but I promise it won’t be boring.”
David Bowie
“Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“Travel and change of place impart new vigour to the mind.”
Seneca
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.”
Robert Louis Stevenson
Read What I Learnt from a Birthday Party in Shanghai
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
John Steinbeck
“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
Read A Sense of Place
“I love to travel, but hate to arrive.”
Albert Einstein
“There’s a sunrise and a sunset every single day, and they’re absolutely free. Don’t miss so many of them.”
Jo Walton
Read A run before dawn near the international dateline
“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.”
Cesare Pavese
“We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.”
Hilaire Belloc
“I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.”
Caskie Stinnett
“To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.”
Charles Horton Cooley
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
Herman Melville
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
Henry David Thoreau
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at least to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
G.K. Chesterton
“Travel teaches toleration.”
Benjamin Disraeli
Read Stranded in Saudi Arabia without a passport
“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
Anatole France
“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”
Andre Gide
“Half of the fun of travel is the aesthetic of lostness.”
Ray Bradbury
“And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”
Pico Iyer
“It’s a funny thing about comin’ home. Looks the same, smells the same, feels the same. You’ll realize what’s changed is you.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Read A Sense of Place
“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
Lin Yutang
“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”
Helen Keller
Read: Going back to the Murder Capital of the World
“Coming back to your native land after an absence of many years is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking up from a long coma.”
Bill Bryson
Read A Sense of Place
“It is better to travel well than to arrive.”
Buddha
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”
T. S. Eliot
“Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond.”
Hypatia
“Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.”
John Steinbeck
“Slow travel now rivals the fly-to-Barcelona-for-lunch culture. Advocates savour the journey, travelling by train or boat or bicycle, or even on foot, rather than crammed into an airplane. They take time to plug into the local culture instead of racing through a list of tourist traps.”
Carl Honore
“Paris is always a good idea.”
Audrey Hepburn
“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
“You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.”
William Hazlitt
“What is it we want out of travel? Is it to take snapshots of ourselves in front of famous monuments, surrounded by other tourists? To eat unfamiliar food chosen from unintelligible menus? To earn frequent-flier miles? No. It’s to glimpse what life is like somewhere else.”
Chris Pavone
“One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.”
Thomas Jefferson
“I travel continuously, and I see many cities, but there is nowhere like London.”
Norman Foster
“The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”
Werner Herzog
“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
“Food makes travel so exceptional, because you get to taste what it’s actually supposed to taste like. To eat the real Pad Thai or finally have a proper curry is something pretty amazing.”
Meghan Markle
“Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there’s an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It’s the travel experience that has moved me the most.”
Roman Coppola
Read Kyoto in the Snow
“Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.”
Truman Capote
“I am learning that in life it is OK to travel in darkness, not knowing what your next move is.”
Cobie Smulders
“Every traveler knows too well the endless quest for the perfect travel bag: the one that’s stylish enough to carry through Paris, sturdy enough to tote around Peru, and – most important – doesn’t make your shoulder sag even before you’ve loaded it up with everything you need for a day of sightseeing.”
Hanya Yanagihara
“He travels the fastest who travels alone.”
Rudyard Kipling
“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”
Mary Ritter Beard
“I never thought it was fair that women couldn’t travel freely because it was dangerous. I’d stay by myself on the North Carolina coast for a couple of weeks, with my dog and my gun, and my mom would be terrified. I told her, if I stay home, a lamp could fall on my head. You can’t spend your whole life inside because you’re scared.”
Margo Price
Read: Going back to the Murder Capital of the World
“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
“The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
Samuel Johnson
“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.”
Gilbert K. Chesterton
“It’s important to travel and move and have a continual set of experiences so you’ve got more to feed back into your work. For me, it’s a natural thing.”
Cate Blanchett
“If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.”
Dan Rather
“When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist.”
Mohsin Hamid
“I think I am a travel junkie, and I have never enjoyed anything else in my life more than travelling and going to places.”
Imtiaz Ali
“You develop a sympathy for all human beings when you travel a lot.”
Shakuntala Devi
“Travel teaches toleration.”
Benjamin Disraeli
“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
Rudyard Kipling
Read A first class train ticket to Varanasi
“You can learn from everyone, the president or the cleaner. You need teachers in life, but they’re not always school teachers or professors. You learn from ordinary people. You learn from travel, from just walking down the street.”
Lapo Elkann
“I have gotten to travel the world and experience all these incredible things thanks to my career.”
Karlie Kloss
“Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially.”
Tom Freston
“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
“Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.”
Lawrence Durrell
“As I get older, the things that I want are starting to make more sense. Being able to travel makes me happy, and I am a person that lives in the moment. I also want to live a good life. Traveling makes everyday issues seem so much smaller and really changes my perspective on things.”
Jacqueline MacInnes Wood
“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.”
Charles Kuralt
“I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.”
George Bernard Shaw
“When the traveler goes alone he gets acquainted with himself.”
Liberty Hyde Bailey
“A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.”
Lin Yutang
“Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.”
Susan Sontag
“How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”
R. Buckminster Fuller
“Travelers never think that they are the foreigners.”
Mason Cooley
“Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”
Benjamin Disraeli
“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
“You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.”
Ella Maillart
“I still make sure to go, at least once every year, to a country where things cannot be taken for granted, and where there is either too much law and order or too little.”
Christopher Hitchens
“I live and work alone and travel light, relying largely on my memory and making a point of letting intuition guide my way.”
Lyall Watson
“I’ve met the most interesting people while flying or on a boat. These methods of travel seem to attract the kind of people I want to be with.”
Hedy Lamar
“The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.”
Marshall McLuhan
Read Observing Timor Leste without taking photos
“The people with the passports, the people who travel more, tend to be the most understanding. And it’s ironic that the people who travel the least have the strongest opinions about the people they’ve never met.”
Brian Chesky
“If I have to travel, I’m going to travel my way and travel in the real world. And I’m going to have conversations every day with people in rest stops and people in gas stations and people in hotels and diners. That nourishes me.”
Neil Peart
“There can be many reasons to travel, but wandering into the world for no particular reason is a sublime madness, which in all its whimsy and pointlessness may depict the story of life – and indeed could be a useful model to keep in mind, seeing as so much of life’s ambition comes unstuck or leads to nothing much at all.”
Michael Leunig
“Travel works best when you’re forced to come to terms with the place you’re in.”
Paul Theroux
Read What I Learnt from a Birthday Party in Shanghai
“The amount of hassle involved in travel can be overwhelming.”
Paul Theroux
“The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It’s a passion. And I can’t understand people who don’t want to travel.”
Paul Theroux
“The job of the travel writer is to go far and wide, to make voluminous notes, to tell the truth.”
Paul Theroux
“Travel is the best and probably cheapest graduate school you can buy.”
Tom Freston
“Travel is so important in its capacity to expand the mind. It’s exciting to start as young as possible – you get to see how other cultures live, challenge your senses, and try different cuisines.”
Natalie Dormer
“The best way to travel abroad is to live with the locals.”
Zach Braff
“We must travel in the direction of our fear.”
John Berryman
Read: Going back to the Murder Capital of the World
“Travel is the only way to get empathy for other people’s mindsets – to know their struggles and what they’re drawn to.”
Abigail Spencer
“The only thing I like about air travel is it gives me time to read.”
Jane Lindskold
“I travel in so many different ways; I travel high, I rough it… it all depends on who I travel with.”
Diane von Furstenberg
“The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it.”
Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
“An English man does not travel to see English men.”
Laurence Sterne
“Spontaneity is what travel is all about.”
Zach Anner
“I love to travel. This is the time for me. When will I do it if not now?”
Rakul Preet Singh
“The trouble with travelling back later on is that you can never repeat the same experience.”
Michael Palin
“I aimlessly travel, meaning I have no agenda other than to get small in the world, be quiet and observe people.”
Walton Goggins
“If you want to succeed you should strike out on new paths, rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.”
John D. Rockefeller
“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
Ernest Hemingway
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“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
“To travel is to take a journey into yourself.”
Danny Kaye
“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.”
Rosalia de Castro
“I always encourage people to get out there, travel the world, see new things, experience new people, experience new food, experience new culture. What happens is that helps you to grow and be your best self.”
Karamo Brown
