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The 77 most inspirational travel quotes ever penned

The 77 most inspirational travel quotes ever penned

Our favourite inspirational travel quotes that encouraged us to travel – with abandon – over the years. Maybe they will do the same for you…

For us, there is no such thing as luxury travel; travel is, by default, a luxury. It is a privilege provided by the country of our birth, a privilege that many are not as fortunate to enjoy.

Sometimes, we have to pinch ourselves at just how ridiculous our lives have become: an ex-teacher and jobbing writer travelling the world for a living. It is absurd, it is astonishing, and it is a luxury.

When I first went travelling at 21 years old, my father gave me this quote scrawled on a piece of card.

inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots One of the most inspirational travel quotes ever penned

It motivated me to get out, make the most of my privilege, see the world and enjoy the benefits of travelling – it remains one of the most inspirational travel quotes I’ve read.

Today, over 15 years and 80 countries later, it’s still in my wallet. Despite its tattered and dishevelled appearance, it’s every bit as important to me now as it was then.

With that in mind, we’ve collated our most beloved inspirational travel quotes to encourage readers to “explore, dream and discover”.

inspirational travel quotes

1. “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

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
St. Augustine

inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots The world is a book…

3. “Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage.”
Paulo Coelho

4. “With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.”
Sandra Lake

With travel, comes understanding

5. “When overseas you learn more about your own country, than you do the place you’re visiting.”
Clint Borgen

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

inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Twain is responsible for three of our inspirational travel quotes

7. “Don’t tell me the sky’s the limit when there are footprints on the moon.”
Paul Brandt

8. “The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”
Henry David Thoreau

The man who goes alone…

9. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
Rudyard Kipling

10. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
Lao Tzu

A journey of a thousand miles... inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots A journey of a thousand miles…

11. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.”
Susan Heller Anderson

12. “No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be.”
Chuck Thompson

Worth remembering

13. “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

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

A good traveler... inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots A good traveler…

15. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.”
Charles Dudley Warner

16. “A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.”
John A. Shedd

Sail away!

17. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”
Paul Theroux

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

Not all those who wander are lost... inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Not all those who wander are lost…

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

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

Like all great travelers…

21. “Once a year, go somewhere you’ve never been before.”
The Dalai Lama

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

How beautiful it is to travel... inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots How beautiful it is to travel…

23. “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

24. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

There are no foreign lands…

25. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
Paul Theroux

26. “A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.”
Moslih Eddin Saadi

Moslih Eddin Saadi inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Wise words from Moslih Eddin Saadi

27. “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

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

One’s destination is never a place…

29. “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

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

Wandering... travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Wandering…

31. “I can’t control the wind but I can adjust the sail.”
Ricky Skaggs

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

Travel for fulfilment quote
Travel for fulfilment…

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

34. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.”
James Michener

James Michener inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Wise woods from James Michener

35. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”
Samuel Johnson

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

Money isn't everything quote
Money isn’t everything

37. “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

38. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
Martin Buber

All journeys have secret destinations...
Atlas & Boots All journeys have secret destinations…

39. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.”
Robert Frost

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”
Seneca

inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Travel and change…

41. “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

42. “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

Once the travel bug bites inspirational travel quote
Once the travel bug bites…

43. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
Tim Cahill

44. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”
John Steinbeck

A journey is like marriage... inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots A journey is like marriage…

45. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”
Clifton Fadiman

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

There are better things ahead...
There are better things ahead…

47. “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

48. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”
Aldous Huxley

To travel is to discover...
Atlas & Boots Huxley is responsible for two of our inspirational travel quotes

49. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.”
Paul Fussell

50. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
Mark Twain

Mark Twain Quote about travelling with friends
To travel solo or with friends?

51. “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.”
G.K. Chesterton

52. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.”
Elizabeth Drew

Travel broadens the mind inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Travel broadens the mind

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

54. “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

See the world quote by Ray Bradbury
See the world!

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

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

The journey not the arrival matters
Atlas & Boots The journey not the arrival matters

57. “Time flies. It’s up to you to be the navigator.”
Robert Orben

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

Marcel Proust quote
A wonderful quote from Marcel Proust

59. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
Oscar Wilde

60. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

I travel for travel’s sake... inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots I travel for travel’s sake…

61. “If an ass goes travelling, he’ll not come home a horse.”
Thomas Fuller

62. “Travelling tends to magnify all human emotions.”
Peter Hoeg

“Travelling tends to magnify all human emotions.”
“Travelling tends to magnify all human emotions.”

63. “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

64. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”
Freya Stark

A strange town... inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots A strange town…

65. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine from the other side of the world.”
Mary Anne Radmacher

66. “I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question.”
Harun Yahya

Puffins rest on a rock
Perhaps we’re not so different?

67. “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.”
George Bernard Shaw

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

A wise traveler... inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots A wise traveler…

69. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
Andre Gide

70 “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
Ibn Battuta

Travelling can leave you speechless
Travelling can leave you speechless

71. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.”
Anais Nin

72. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”
Miriam Beard

Travel is deep and permanent inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Travel is deep and permanent

73. “The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.”
Richard Burton

74. “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

A tent beneath the stars
See the world from a new angle

75. “He who would travel happily must travel light.”
Antoine de St. Exupery

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

inspirational travel quotes
Atlas & Boots Our battered suitcases…

77. “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 harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Mark Twain


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The Lonely Planet Ultimate Travel List is the definitive wish-list of the best places to visit on earth – the perfect accompaniment to our selection of inspirational travel quotes.

Lead image: Atlas & Boots

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