104 Inspiring Travel Quotes

Ever found yourself daydreaming about far-off destinations, exotic cuisines, and immersive cultural experiences? Travel has a way of igniting our imagination and inspiring us to explore the unknown corners of the world. Sometimes, a few well-chosen words can capture the essence of wanderlust and motivate us to pack our bags and set off on a new adventure. In this collection, we've gathered the top 104 inspiring travel quotes to fuel your travel dreams and remind you of the endless possibilities that await. Whether you're an avid traveler or simply someone who loves the idea of discovering new places, these quotes are sure to spark your wanderlust and keep your adventurous spirit alive.

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

2. “No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.” - John Ruskin

3. “It was as if we'd only been gone the weekend. Or had we been gone a lifetime. Part of that was because when you've lived in Alaska, living in other places seems easier, less challenging, less threatening. Alaska had enlarged each of us. No one is ever the same after coming back from Alaska.” - Peter Jenkins

4. “There are two kinds of travel: first class and with children.” - Robert Benchley

5. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

6. “Traveling 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, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese

7. “But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting. Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu...” - W. Somerset Maugham

8. “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

9. “You are what you inhabit.” - Lawrence Millman

10. “After a day on Mykines, I changed my mind about life not going on. A sort of life was going on, beating with a reasonalbe version of a pulse, but that life consisted for the most part of travelers like myself. There were maybe a dozen of us -- one third of the island's population. Our tribe could only increase as the Mykines tribe dwindled away, a few falling down steps, most simply emigrating, until there would be, sad to say, only our peripatetic selves. We were the future of all places condemned by remoteness to a lingering, photogenic death.” - Lawrence Millman

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

12. “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” - G.K. Chesterton

13. “Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.” - Roseanne Barr

14. “It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all.” - Jim Hinckley

15. “There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.” - colum mccann

16. “Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.(They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.)” - Horace

17. “The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.” - Rolf Potts

18. “I'm with you in Rocklandin my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.” - Allen Ginsberg

19. “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

20. “I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.” - Bill Bryson

21. “The difference between travel writing as fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy - how sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction.” - Paul Theroux

22. “Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.” - Alain De Botton

23. “I tramp a perpetual journey.” - Walt Whitman

24. “You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city...you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn't even know were there. Everything changes.” - Samuel R. Delany

25. “The secret to youth is to fill your mind with beauty! Amen” - Linda Ballou

26. “Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.” - Truman Capote

27. “In London it had seemed impossible to travel without the proper evening clothes. One could see an invitation arriving for an Embassy ball or something. But on the other side of Europe with the first faint tinges of faraway places becoming apparent and exciting, to say nothing of vanishing roads and extra weight, Embassy balls held less significance.” - Robert Edison Fulton Jr.

28. “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

29. “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

30. “Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” - Neil Gaiman

31. “The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.” - Guillermo Del Toro

32. “At night, after the exhausting games of canasta, we would look out over the immense sea, full of white-flecked and green reflections, the two of us leaning side by side on the railing, each of us far away, flying in his own aircraft to the stratospheric regions of our own dreams. There we understood that our vocation, our true vocation, was to move for eternity along the roads and seas of the world. Always curious, looking into everything that came before our eyes, sniffing out each corner but only ever faintly - not setting down roots in any land or staying long enough to see the substratum of things; the outer limits would suffice.” - Ernesto Che Guevara

33. “Every mode of travel has its signature mental aberration.” - Mary Roach

34. “أليس من الأفضل أن نهاجر بدلاً من أن نتزوج؟فالزواج هجرة داخلية” - نجيب محفوظ

35. “Across galaxies of time and spaceTravelling just to see your faceLost amidst the countless starsTo bring me back to where you are.” - Bryce W. Anderson

36. “Dad reckons if you have a great time in one place, then that's a good reason for never going back. Nothing will ever measure up to the first time. He laughs at people who go to the same place every year, same beach, same house, same things to do.” - James Moloney

37. “What I remembered most clearly about this Jinja road was that on portions of it, for reasons no one could explain, butterflies settled in long fluffy tracts. There might be eighty feet of road carpeted by white butterflies, so many of them that if you drove too fast your tires lost their grip, and some people lost their lives, skidding on butterflies.” - Paul Theroux

38. “اختلاف الأماكن من بلد إلى بلد اّخر لا يعنى كثيراً,و إنما اختلاف الناس هو الذى يعنى أكثر,لأننا نعاشر الناس و لا نعاشر الجدران.و انت لا تسافر حينما تغير مكانك و لكنك تكون قد سافرت حينما توسع من ثقافتك و تثرى من عاطفتك و تجدد من روحك.” - مصطفى محمود

39. “A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made. You go from one place to another place, and on to somewhere else again, and already behind you there is no trace that you were ever there.” - Damon Galgut

40. “I speak to maps. And sometimes they something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps, the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable.” - Abdulrazak Gurnah

41. “The storm long past, the night sky was beset with stars. Pointing upward, I asked her to pick a point of light and stay with it. Standing up, I eased Sara to her feet. Whispering into her ear, I asked, “Have you ever stood under a star... and felt the earth move under your feet?” - Michael Poeltl

42. “Ultimately, I found my instincts mirrored in a line from Thoreau: 'My needle...always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more exhausted and richer on that side.” - Phillip Connors

43. “...a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.” - Michael Lewis

44. “The paradox of love is that to have it is to want to preserve it because it's perfect in the moment but that preservation is impossible because the perfection is only ever an instant passed through. Love like travel is a series of moments that we immediately leave behind. Still we try to hold on and embalm against all evidence and common sense proclaiming our promises and plans. The more I loved him the more I felt hope. But hope acknowledges uncertainty and so I also felt my first premonitions of loss.” - Elisabeth Eaves

45. “You sell off the kingdom piece by piece and trade it for a horse that will take you anywhere.” - Colin Wright

46. “For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.” - Tahir Shah

47. “Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.” - Thornton Wilder

48. “That day, I really believed that I had grasped something and that henceforth my life would be changed. But insights cannot be held for ever. Like water, the world ripples across you and for a while you take on its colours. Then it recedes, and leaves you face to face with the void you carry inside yourself, confronting that central inadequacy of soul which you must learn to rub shoulders with and to combat, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest impetus.” - Nicolas Bouvier

49. “Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question...yes.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

50. “Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!” - Kenneth Grahame

51. “In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls – with the great outside world.” - Booker T. Washington

52. “It was exciting to be off on a journey she had looked forward to for months. Oddly, the billowing diesel fumes of the airport did not smell like suffocating effluence, it assumed a peculiar pungent scent that morning, like the beginning of a new adventure, if an adventure could exude a fragrance.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

53. “Sir Henry fixed him with a keen eye.'Odd name, Tom Skatt - eh?''Thats right''You don't think we could be related?'Tom looked up at his great-great-great-uncle and smiled.'I don't think so''No,' grinned Sir Henry "no, of course not” - Henry Chancellor

54. “There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.” - Tahir Shah

55. “Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.” - Tahir Shah

56. “No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.” - Patrick Rothfuss

57. “What gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we all have.” - Elizabeth Benedict

58. “By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.” - Bill Bryson

59. “For I was reared in the great city, pent with cloisters dim,and saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.But thou, my babe! Shalt wander like a breezeBy lakes and sandy shores, beneath the cragsOf ancient mountains, and beneath the clouds,Which image in their bulk both lakes and shoresAnd mountain crags: so shall thou see and hearThe lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy GodUtters, who from eternity doth teachHimself in all, and al things in himselfGreat universal teacher! He shall moldThy spirit and by giving , make it ask.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

60. “Well, if you ask me what’s so special about this place.. aku akan bilang, most of the time, beauty lies in the simplest of things.Kayak semilir angin pagi dari teras kamar.Minum air tanpa harus dijerang lebih dulu.Makan sayuran hijau yang baru dipetik.Mendaki kebun teh di siang hari, di tengah gerimis.Menyeruput kuah dengan berisik, setelah kenyang menyantap rebusan rebung muda.Sarapan di kedai mi sederhana yang pernah masuk program televisi.Berjalan kaki sepanjang pasar malam yang dihiasi temaram lentera kertas.Menuliskan doa di kuil.Minum teh hangat di atap terbuka, di bawah hamparan langit berbintang.Hiking di rain forest dan menikmati alam terbuka.Ini hanya kisah perjalanan sederhana, dibumbui beberapa gigitan nyamuk, oleh-oleh sepasang sumpit kayu, dan petualangan kuliner yang nambah-nambahin bobot timbangan. Ini cerita tentang menemukan sesuatu yang nggak terduga, di tempat yang tidak disangka.Semua dari sebuah desa kecil bernama air.And that’s the beauty of small things.Don’t you agree?” - Winna Efendi

61. “It is my hope that this book will help to demystify the origins of travel writing and show that when thousands of travelers follow a guidebook word-for-word, recommendation-for-recommendation, it not only harms contemporary international travel but can also do serious harm to places in developing countries.” - Thomas Kohnstamm

62. “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

63. “Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.” - Ma Jian

64. “As for me...I'm fine. I have bad dreams, but I never saw Mister Duck again. I play video games. I smoke a little dope. I got my thousand-yard stare. I carry a lot of scares.I like the way that sounds.I carry a lot of scares.” - Alex Garland

65. “After every shirt she looks at me and smiles, letting go of air she no longer needs. She laughs after the sweater, knowing I’m gonna tell her it’s too hot for it, knowing she’ll say it’s for the plane and ask “what if the room gets cold?” - Darnell Lamont Walker

66. “The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.” - Alain De Botton

67. “...Don't insult readers by questioning the extent of their imaginations. Most need only to be nudged to solve a good mystery.” - Peggy Kopman-Owens

68. “For anyone who wanted to throw away his watch, along with his past, this was the place.” - Peggy Kopman-Owens

69. “How could I ever forget my best friend, the man, who had changed my destiny simply by allowing me to write about him?” - Peggy Kopman-Owens

70. “In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: "Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure." Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon.” - Peter Nichols

71. “The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

72. “...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.” - Pico Iyer

73. “To become a writer a person must read constantly, the more varied the writers and their material then all the better. One must also have a lot of life experience, travel to exotic locations and live among the local people. Yet most importantly a writer needs the determination to keep at their writing regardless of what others might say or think about it” - Andrew James Pritchard

74. “On that trip I learnt something very important. Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed." (The Beach)” - Alex Garland

75. “And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deep-throated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes; and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music. [...]As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up - probably somebody lighting a wood-fire-and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr. Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again. He got up trembling.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

76. “Just because I am paranoid does not mean that someone is not out to get me” - Don Darkes

77. “I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

78. “It's hard to be less than happy when you can be happy with less.” - Chris Brady

79. “Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.” - Rolf Potts

80. “Non si può vivere in questo mondo, ma non c'è nessun altro posto dove andare.” - Jack Kerouac

81. “It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.” - Frances Mayes

82. “And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.” - Donna George Storey

83. “There is a saying, if any stranger enquire of the first met of Maan, were it even a child, “Who is here the sheykh?” he would answer him “I am he.” - Charles Montagu Doughty

84. “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

85. “The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball + Bollywood and underlined it twice.” - La Carmina

86. “I would love you all the day, every night we would kiss and play, if with me you'd fondly stray, over the hills and far away.” - john gray

87. “A traveler's most interesting meals tend to happen by surprise.” - David Dale

88. “Odd, some might think. Why someone would need to travel so far to find oneself. Surely a look in the mirror would suffice, and wouldn’t that be cheaper too? But the mirror lies, and the eyes that do the looking conspire too.” - Farish A. Noor

89. “Let me sing the beauty of my Maggie. Legs:--the knees attached to the thighs, knees shiny, thighs like milk. Arms:--the levers of my content, the serpents of my joy. Back:--the sight of that in a strange street of dreams in the middle of Heaven would make me fall sitting from glad recognition. Ribs?--she had some melted and round like a well formed apple, from her thigh bones to waist I saw the earth roll. In her neck I hid myself like a lost snow goose of Australia, seeking the perfume of her breast. . . . She didn't let me, she was a good girl. The poor big alley cat, though almost a year younger, had black ideas about her legs that he hid from himself, also in his prayers didn't mention . . . the dog. Across the big world darkness I've come, in boat, in bus, in airplane, in train standing my shadow immense traversing the fields and the redness of engine boilers behind me making me omnipotent upon the earth of the night, like God--but I have never made love with a little finger that has won me since. I gnawed her face with my eyes; she loved that; and that was bastardly I didn't know she loved me--I didn't understand.” - Jack Kerouac

90. “Too often when we say we feel joyful, we’re really feeling manic. There is a frenetic nature to our joy, a whiff of panic; we’re afraid the moment might end abruptly. But then there are other moments when our joy is more solidly grounded. I am not speaking of a transcendental moment, of bliss, but something less.” - Eric Weiner

91. “In Chinese business culture, humility is a virtue.” - Stefan H. Verstappen

92. “Tokyo is a very safe city. At night it becomes quiet the way New York never does.” - Rick Kennedy

93. “I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away.Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.” - Peter Ferry

94. “Girly’ products can spur Japan’s growth in this century every bit as much as, if not more than, the ‘manly’ technologies.” - Morinosuke Kawaguchi

95. “Contentment can only be found in not envying others or comparing yourself to them but in being satisfied with what you have.” - Larry Herzberg

96. “They hadn't much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.” - Zelda Fitzgerald

97. “Je pense, donc je suis...Descartes” - Barbara Ann Mojica

98. “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” - Pascal Mercier

99. “We all look back at some time or other and wonder why we didn't listen to our instincts. Why did we hestiate? Why did we lose our dreams?” - Diane Griffith

100. “They lied, you know,” said Cpl. Allan Richmond. He hugged thewall next to Owens. Beside him, PFC Bucky Hatton crouched low, aBrowning 1911 semiautomatic gripped tightly in his hand.“Who?” asked Bart, glad to be out of the wind and rain, even if itwas only for a short time.“The assholes who said France was beautiful.” - Brian W. Matthews

101. “Unless there is a strong sense of place there is no travel writing, but it need not come from topographical description; dialogue can also convey a sense of place. Even so, I insist, the traveler invents the place. Feeling compelled to comment on my travel books, people say to me, "I went there"---China, India, the Pacific, Albania-- "and it wasn't like that." I say, "Because I am not you.” - Paul Theroux

102. “Travel Moulds A Man,People Mould His Wisdom And Experiences Mould His LIFE...!” - Sujit Lalwani

103. “See it, learn it, do it ALL.” - Jamie McCall

104. “I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.” - Tahir Shah