Our World in Words

55 inspiring travel quotes that explain exactly what we feel

Traveling or the urge to do so is not immune to doubt. Sometimes we wonder if seeking roads is the right thing to do, especially we encounter potholes along the way. Or we wonder if maybe it’s better to just stay still. In such times, there is perhaps nothing more comforting and enlightening than nuggets of wisdom from inveterate travelers themselves. 
Cast your fear aside and fuel your wanderlust with these inspiring travel quotes.
“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”
 —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Fear is only temporary. Regrets last forever.”
— Unknown

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

“The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. ” ― Agnes Repplier

“Let freedom never perish in your hands.”   
― Joseph Addison
“We live in a 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

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

“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 doesn’t become adventure until you leave yourself behind.” 
— Marty Rubin

“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

“Anything that gets your blood racing is probably worth doing.” 
— Hunter S. Thompson
“Travel has a way of stretching the mind.” 
— Ralph Crawshaw

“Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.  
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn


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

“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.”
  ― Seth Godin

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
— Henry David Thoreau


“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.” 
— Edward Abbey
“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.”
— Cesare Pavese
“It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.”
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

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

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

“Traveling is not something you’re good at. It’s something you do, like breathing.”
— Gayle Foreman

“Without new experiences something inside us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.”
— Frank Herbert

“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time”. — Andre Gide

“Half of the fun of travel is the aesthetic of lostness. “
— Ray Bradbury
“By taking to the road, we free ourselves of baggage, both physical and psychological. We walk back to our original condition, to our best selves.”
—  Robyn Davidson
 “Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness.” 
— Frank Tyger
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust
“Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.” 
― Andy Rooney
“I address you all tonight for who you truly are: wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, and magicians. You are the true dreamers.”
― Brian Selznick
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” — Robert Louis Stevenson
“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

“Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey.”
 — Babs Hoffman

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

“Travel brings power and love back into your life.”  
― Jalaluddin Rumi
“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, the sea, the sky — all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” 
— Cesare Pavese
“Still round the corner there may wait, A new road or a secret gate.”
― J. R. R. Tolkien
“There’s a lot of optimism in changing scenery, in seeing what’s down the road.”
—  Conor Oberst
“Don’t listen to what they say, go see” 
— Chinese Proverb
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it. “
—  Yogi Berra
“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
“A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
— John Steinbeck
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” 
— Aldous Huxley

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

“I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road.” 
— Amin Maalouf
“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

“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.”
— Earl Nightingale

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

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.”
— Martin Buber

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


“People don’t take trips…trips take people.”
— John Steinbeck

“If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to it.” 
—  Jonathan Winters

“Travel teaches toleration.”  ― Benjamin Disraeli

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”  
— Mae West

About the Author

Gretchen Filart

Gretchen Filart is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and essayist from the Philippines. Her confessional pieces draw from love, motherhood, healing, nature, and intersections and have received distinction from phoebe’s Spring Poetry Contest and Navigator’s Travel Writing Competition. Connect with her on Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok @gretchenfilart. She is usually friendly.

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