61 Inspiring Journey Quotes

Embarking on a journey is one of life's most profound experiences, filled with lessons, challenges, and growth. Whether it's a physical expedition to far-off lands or a personal quest for inner transformation, each journey is unique and deeply transformative. Quotes about journeys have the power to inspire, motivate, and offer reflections that resonate with our own paths. They remind us of the importance of the process, the beauty in the trials, and the joy in the discoveries along the way. In this collection of 61 inspiring journey quotes, you'll find words of wisdom from travelers, thinkers, and visionaries that will encourage you to embrace each step of your own journey, no matter where it may lead.

1. “The greatest thing in this world is not so much where we stand as in what direction we are moving.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

2. “I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid certain surroundings, but they have always a nostalgia for a home they know not. They are strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among the only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves. Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.” - W. Somerset Maugham

3. “Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.You must travel it by yourself.It is not far. It is within reach.Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.” - Walt Whitman

4. “I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new, and that is ultimately good for the artist.” - Billy Joel

5. “Though the road's been rocky it sure feels good to me.” - Bob Marley

6. “...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.” - David Mitchell

7. “Returning home is the most difficult part of long-distance hiking; You have grown outside the puzzle and your piece no longer fits.” - Cindy Ross

8. “Of all the paths a man could strike into, there is, at any given moment, a best path .. A thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do .. To find this path, and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him.” - Thomas Carlyle

9. “Would you like to know your future?If your answer is yes, think again. Not knowing is the greatest life motivator.So enjoy, endure, survive each moment as it comes to you in its proper sequence -- a surprise.” - Vera Nazarian

10. “Memory is the basis of every journey.” - Stephen King

11. “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

12. “A journey is a fragment of Hell.” - Bruce Chatwin

13. “When you reach for the stars, you are reaching for the farthest thing out there. When you reach deep into yourself, it is the same thing, but in the opposite direction. If you reach in both directions, you will have spanned the universe.” - Vera Nazarian

14. “I made up my mind not to care so much about the destination, and simply enjoy the journey.” - David Archuleta

15. “I took the sleeper out of Glasgow, and as the smelly old train bumped out of Central Station and across the Jamaica Street Bridge, I stared out at the orange halogen streetlamps reflected in the black water of the river Clyde. I gazed at the crumbling Victorian buildings that would soon be sandblasted and renovated into yuppie hutches. I watched the revelers and rascals traverse the shiny wet streets. I thought of the thrill and danger of my youth and the fear and frustration of my adult life thus far. I thought of the failure of my marriage and my failures as a man. I saw all this through my reflection in the nighttime window. Down the tracks I went, hardly aware that I was going further south with every passing second.” - Craig Ferguson

16. “DESTINY (Determined Effort So Tanacious It Negates Yuck)” - Frank Chase Jr

17. “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” - Andre Gide

18. “No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” - David Foster Wallace

19. “We may run, walk, stumble. drive, or fly, but let us never lose sight of the reason for the journey, or miss a chance to see a rainbow on the way.” - Gloria Gaither

20. “Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.” - Hermann Hesse

21. “The miracles of our dreams lie beneath our foot soles -- in each and every tiny step we take as we journey to the stars… I reckon the destination isn’t the only miracle.” - Besa Kosova

22. “It is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing, Umbopa, that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross; save a mountain and a desert of which you are spared the knowledge, if love leads him and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing, ready to keep it or to lose it as Providence may order.” - H. Rider Haggard

23. “It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky and sea are black as inkour hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.Only when we drink poison are we well —we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new. ("Le Voyage")” - Charles Baudelaire

24. “He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream, no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

25. “To envision the future; you must forget the past and make the present a memory” - Jeremy Aldana

26. “We never know the journey another person has walked, so be kind to everyone.” - Lynette Mather

27. “Your journey has molded you for your greater good, and it was exactly what it needed to be. Don't think you've lost time. There is no short-cutting to life. It took each and every situation you have encountered to bring you to the now. And now is right on time.” - Asha Tyson

28. “Love, as life, is a journey. Finding true love for the ever after is an amazing achievement.” - Fadi Hattendorf

29. “For everything in this journey of life we are on, there is a right wing and a left wing: for the wing of love there is anger; for the wing of destiny there is fear; for the wing of pain there is healing; for the wing of hurt there is forgiveness; for the wing of pride there is humility; for the wing of giving there is taking; for the wing of tears there is joy; for the wing of rejection there is acceptance; for the wing of judgment there is grace; for the wing of honor there is shame; for the wing of letting go there is the wing of keeping. We can only fly with two wings and two wings can only stay in the air if there is a balance. Two beautiful wings is perfection. There is a generation of people who idealize perfection as the existence of only one of these wings every time. But I see that a bird with one wing is imperfect. An angel with one wing is imperfect. A butterfly with one wing is dead. So this generation of people strive to always cut off the other wing in the hopes of embodying their ideal of perfection, and in doing so, have created a crippled race.” - C. JoyBell C.

30. “A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation” - Tahir Shah

31. “I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.” - Tahir Shah

32. “What you're missing is that the path itself changes you.” - Julien Smith

33. “Funny how "question" contains the word "quest" inside it, as though any small question asked is a journey through briars.” - Catherynne M. Valente

34. “If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.” - Tahir Shah

35. “On a harsh expedition, there's no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.” - Tahir Shah

36. “A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.” - Tahir Shah

37. “When I am about to embark on a difficult journey, I comfort myself by reading the accounts of the great nineteenth-century travellers, men like Stanley, Burton, Speke, Burckhardt and Barth.” - Tahir Shah

38. “I love going out of my way, beyond what I know, and finding my way back a few extra miles, by another trail, with a compass that argues with the map…nights alone in motels in remote western towns where I know no one and no one I know knows where I am, nights with strange paintings and floral spreads and cable television that furnish a reprieve from my own biography, when in Benjamin’s terms, I have lost myself though I know where I am. Moments when I say to myself as feet or car clear a crest or round a bend, I have never seen this place before. Times when some architectural detail on vista that has escaped me these many years says to me that I never did know where I was, even when I was home.” - Rebecca Solnit

39. “The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out of an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.” - Thomas Merton

40. “If you fuel your journey on the opinions of others, you are going to run out of gas.” - Steve Maraboli

41. “Each of our lives’ is a separate and precious journey. No matter how happy, sad, painful, tragic or confusing it may by, it is unique and beautiful. No matter if we hurt others or if we ourselves were hurt, it happened and it is part of our story. If we think we can have complete control over this journey, our journey will wake us up… usually with a very unpleasant surprise.More than genetics, money or education, it is our journey who defines who we are. It defines what kind of person you are. Not the experiences you encountered nor the happy or traumatic events you may have endured. But rather how we dealt with those events and how we continue to deal with those events; when we evaluate ourselves and how we treat others. Your journey is part of your story. But it is not the complete story of who and how you are. You are a soul, a spirit, who has traveled through this life and along the way; you learned and gathered bits and pieces from here and there. And you, yourself, have woven together a soul, a spirit. And that is who you are today. You define… you.Oh, and just in case you thought your journey, your story was over… surprise, its not. So keep weaving. You are not finished yet. It is never to late to define who you are.” - José N. Harris

42. “We’ve been focusing so much on getting there that we haven’t been enjoying the ride” - Elizabeth Eulberg

43. “I wanted to create a voyage to the moon just for her, but what Ishould have given her was a real journey on earth.” - Mathias Malzieu

44. “Armed with my positive attitude and inherent stubborn nature, I keep my mind focused and my life moving forward. I stop to rest, pout and even cry sometimes, but always, I get back up. Life is giving me this challenge and I will plow through it, out of breath with my heart racing if I have to.” - Amy B. Scher

45. “I am a butterfly poetbirthed from painflying with the freedomof my verses.” - Susie Clevenger

46. “There is nothing in the path of life that we don't already know before we start. Nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

47. “There is a wide world out there, full of pain, but filled with joy as well. The former keeps you on the path of growth and the latter makes the journey tolerable.” - R.A. Salvatore

48. “Between here and there is a journey illuminated by the rising and setting of a radiant sun. Don't miss its splendor in your all-fired hurry to cross the finish line.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

49. “A journey is best measured in friends rather than miles.” - Tim Cahill

50. “A little known fact: I read all the time. books were the one thing that got me out of Gatlin, even if it was only for a little while.” - Kami Garcia

51. “As much as we look up at the stars and know there is more than life on earth, the divinity of dogs is just as unexplainable and profound. They may be the purest example of divine love in an earthly soul many of us ever experience. If we take their lead, open our hearts, and embrace their love, we may just find our own journey a lot more enlightening.” - Jennifer Skiff

52. “There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to finish.” - Don Roff

53. “Every journey is personal. Every journey is spiritual. You can't compare them, can't replace, can't repeat. You can bring back the memories but they only bring tears to your eyes.” - Riana Ambarsari

54. “When you put fear behind the wheel, you're bound to crash, but when you drive in faith the ride will be rough, but preceding into a journey of your lifetime.” - Anthony Liccione

55. “So we found the end of our journey.So we stood, alive in the river of light,Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.” - Ted Hughes

56. “Dich hab ich nicht erreicht-Doch nähert Tag für TagSich dir mein FußDrei Flüsse noch und ein BergIch überqueren muss.Noch Eine Wüste, noch ein Meer,Die Reise aber zähl ich nicht,Wenn ich dann vor Dir steh.Wir schreiten leicht, wie Schnee wir stehen,die Wasser murmeln leis.Flüsse, Wüsten, Berg und Meersind von uns durchlaufen.Doch Tod entreißt mir meinen Preis,Dich schauend, er gewinnt.” - Emily Dickinson

57. “Men dream more about coming home than about leaving.” - Paulo Coelho

58. “Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.” - Dan Harmon

59. “Life is good. Even when it isn't. Because there's always HOPE beckoning you from ahead.” - Anusha Atukorala

60. “Life is a journey that gives you the liberty to draw your own map, and choose your own route.” - Dennis E. Adonis

61. “You go to bed different... tossing and turning is the norm... you wake to a sunny day but clouds follow you wherever you go. You wonder if you are strong enough to climb out of the depression you are living in and your prayers to God seem empty because you are sooo very tired of telling him the same thing over and over again..... if we are really being real... there may even be moments after impact you forget how to pray... maybe you don't even want to.” - Erica Stone