When it comes to daydreaming about far-flung places and seeking out a little extra travel inspiration, nothing gets our hearts thumping and filled with wanderlust more than getting lost in a list of amazing, inspirational travel quotes. From historical explorers to modern-day vagabonds and all-around wise people, we’ve compiled some of the best travel quotes of all time for you to simply enjoy or you can even use some of these best travel quotes for Instagram captions.

To help fuel your wanderlust and inspire you to get out there and explore this big, beautiful ball of rock we call home, we’ve gone and put some of the most famous and in our opinion the best travel quotes over some of the most dreamy, voyage-inducing, ‘gram-worthy images we’ve taken on our travels.

So sit back, relax, get comfy, and enjoy a little travel inspiration to help you get motivated for your next adventure with the best travel quotes of all time!

Oh and – feel free to share these awesome travel quotes images far and wide to spread the inspiration love around.

135 Of The Best Travel Quotes Of All Time

The Best Travel Quotes 1 – 50

1. “Not all those who wander are lost.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

2. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ― Laozi

3. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.” ― Hilaire Belloc

4. “I travel to be replenished with beauty, for travel makes the beauty of this world seem like a Christmas that never ends.” ― Carew Papritz

5. “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” — Jack Kerouac

6. “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney

7. “But wherever there is man, there must be some sort of route” ― Robert Edison Fulton Jr.

8. “Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth.” — Rumi

9. “I haven’t been everywhere but it’s on my list.” ― Susan Sontag

10. “Climb the mountain, not so the world can see you, but so you can see the world.” — David McCullough Jr.

11. “There’s a world out there, and you’ve got to look at both sides of the mountain in your lifetime.” — Bill Janklow

12. “You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment.” — Henry David Thoreau

13. “You don’t have to be rich to travel well.”― Eugene Fodor

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

15. “There is freedom waiting for you,
On the breezes of the sky,
And you ask – “What if I fall?”
Oh but my darling,
What if you fly?” — Erin Hanson

16. “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 colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” ― Terry Pratchett

17. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

18. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by.” ― Robert Frost

19. “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to.” ― Judith Thurman

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

21. “A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” ― Laozi

22. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ernest Hemingway

23. “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.” ― Jawaharlal Nehru

24. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” ― Helen Keller

25. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ― Gustave Flaubert

26. “People don’t take trips, trips take people.” ― John Steinbeck

27. “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.” ― Bill Bryson

28. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” ― Marcel Proust

29. “Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.” ― Asian Proverb

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

31. “Travelling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” ―  Ibn Battuta

32. If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.” ― Cesare Pavese

33. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” ― Anita Desai

34. “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” — Ray Bradbury

35. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.” ― Anaïs Nin

36. “Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.” — Henry David Thoreau

37. “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

38. “Part of the urge to explore is a desire to become lost.” ― Tracy Johnston

39. “Oh, the places you’ll go.” — Dr. Seuss

40. “Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.” ― Jack Kerouac

41. “To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert

42. “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.” ― Hans Christian Andersen

43. “Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” ― Benjamin Disraeli

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

45. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” ― André Gide

46. “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” ― Anonymous

47. “Travelling 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

48. “Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure.” ― Paulo Coelho

49. “Once you have travelled, 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

50. “Jobs fill your pocket, but adventures fill your soul.” ― Jamie Lyn Beatty

The Best Travel Quotes 51 – 100

51. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

52. “I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.” ― Roman Payne

53. “Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.” ― Michael Palin

54. “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.” ― Wendell Berry

55. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” ― Neale Donald Walsch

56. “Personally, I like going places where I don’t speak the language, don’t know anybody, don’t know my way around and don’t have any delusions that I’m in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.” ― Michael Mewshaw

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

58. “We travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in and fall in love once more.” ― Pico Iyer

59. “You can’t control the past, but you can control where you go next.” ― Kirsten Hubbard

60. “Maybe you had to leave in order to miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.” ― Jodi Picoult

61. “You have to get lost before you can be found.” ― Jeff Rasley

62. “I had a desire to see something besides my own shores if only to be content to return to them someday. If I wish to live in my native land and love her, it should not be out of ignorance.” ― Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland & The Isles

63. “The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.” ― Paul Theroux

64. “The journey is the destination.” ― Dan Eldon

65. “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” ― Dalai Lama

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

67. “One must travel, to learn.” ― Mark Twain

68. “To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

69. “A wise man travels to discover himself.” ― James Russell Lowell

70. “A ship in harbour is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” ― John A. Shedd

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

72. “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” ― Paolo Coelho

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

74. “Blessed are the curious, for they shall have adventures.” ― Lovelle Drachman

75. “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

76. “Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret” ― Oscar Wilde

77. “A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.” ― Isabelle Eberhardt

78. “Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

80. “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

81. “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” ― C.S. Lewis

82. “Leave no path untaken.” ― Neil Gaiman

83. “Heavy burdens fall away so easily when one is travelling.” ― Barbara Hodgson

84. “Foreign lands never yield their secrets to a traveller. The best they offer are tantalising snippets, just enough to inflame the imagination. The secrets they do reveal are your own – the ones you have kept from yourself. And this is reason enough to travel, to leave home.” ― Graeme Sparkes

85. “Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.” — Freya Stark

86. “Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don’t know and trusting them with your life.” ― Paul Theroux

87. “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

88. “We know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it, and we’ll be haunted by our unrealised dreams.” ― Tim Cahill

89. “The man who seeks to educate himself must first read and then travel in order to correct what he has learned.” ― Casanova

90. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the things you did do. So, throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbour and catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ― Mark Twain

91. “You are only given one life, one chance at fully living it……take risks, believe in your dreams, explore the world and her people, live out loud!” ― Danell Lynn

92. “Travel is the discovery of truth; an affirmation of the promise that humankind is far more beautiful than it is flawed.” ― Dan Thompson

93. “All the world was made for me!” ― Adelaide Crapsey

94. “Travel is the best teacher.” ― C. JoyBell C.

95. “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” — Anonymous

96. “When I travel, people say ‘Yet another place in this world.’ But I see ‘Another world inside every place I go’.” ― Vivek Thangaswamy

97. “How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.” ― Sarah Reijonen

98. “Don’t ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live.” ― Lavinia Spalding

99. “I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.” ― Melody Truong

100. “So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry.” ― Jack Kerouac

The Best Travel Quotes 101 – 135

101. “We are homesick most for the places we have never known.” ― Carson McCullers

102. “Travel opens your mind as few other things do. It is its own form of hypnotism, and I am forever under its spell.” ― Libba Bray

103. “Never hesitate to go far away, beyond all seas, all frontiers, all countries, all beliefs.” ― Amin Maalouf

104. “Travel is a joy, full of surprises.” ― Jane Wilson-Howarth

105. “Life is beautiful if you are on the road to somewhere.” ― Orhan Pamuk

106. “A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” ― Lao Tsu

107. “You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.” ― Paul Theroux

108. “To travel beyond our world is to change this present one forever.” ― Steven J. Carroll

109. “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

110. “I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.” ― J.A. Redmerski

111. “In the end, you’re just happy you were there – with your eyes open – and lived to see it.” ― Anthony Bourdain

112. “Every traveller seeks out places that every traveller has missed.” ― Pico Iyer

113. “Wanderlust is incurable.” ― Mark Jenkins

114. “There was nothing to talk about anymore. The only thing to do was go.” ― Jack Kerouac

115. “Travel. As much as you can. As far as you can. As long as you can. Life’s not meant to be lived in one place.” ― Anonymous

116. “Every journey makes its own map across your heart.” ― Sharon Shinn

117. “Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here, nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.” ― Colleen McCullough

118. “It’s the journey, not the destination that matters.” ― T.S. Eliot

119. “People travel because it teaches them things they could learn no other way.” ― Lance Morrow

120. “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.” ― Paulo Coelho

121. “Whoever created the world went to a lot of trouble. It would be downright rude not to go out and see as much of it as possible.” ― Edward Readicker-Henderson

122. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” ― David Mitchell

123. “Life on the open road is the essence of freedom.” ― Isabelle Eberhardt

124. “Travel doesn’t become adventure until you leave yourself behind.” ― Marty Rubin

125. “One day this will be twenty years ago.” ― Bill Bryson

126. “When you’re travelling, 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

127. “The one certainty is that they would like to be back on the road, going somewhere. To be on their way again – that is the dream.” ― Ryszard Kapuściński

128. “This wasn’t a strange place; it was a new one.” ― Paolo Coelho

129. “The perfect journey is never finished, the goal is always just across the next river, round the shoulder of the next mountain.” ― Rosita Forbes

130. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled.” ― Mohammed

131. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.” ― Mark Twain

132. “The traveller belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.” ― Paul Bowles

133. “I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.” ― Paulo Coelho

134. “Adventure is worthwhile.” ― Aesop

135. “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s OK. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” ― Anthony Bourdain

Be Inspired By These Epic Travel Quotes

With your passion for travel ignited by these awesome, inspirational travel quotes and your hunger for the open road stronger than ever, now is the perfect time to start planning your next adventure.

Whether you’re embarking on a hike to Everest Base Camp or simply exploring more of your hometown, check out this mega list of our absolute favourite travel resources to help you get on your way.

Don’t forget to organise travel insurance before you go on your next adventure to keep you safe on the road. Find out more about why we always choose World Nomads when we travel.

What’s Your Favourite Inspirational Travel Quote?

Do you agree that these are some of the best travel quotes of all time? Is there one quote among them that inspires you above the rest? Did we miss any other best travel quotes that you absolutely love? Let us know in the comments below!

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