71 Powerful Quotes That Will Inspire You To Start Travelling

If your daily routine has become monotonous or you're trapped in a soulless corporate job that you hate, we know just how difficult it can be to get out of the rut you’re in.


But if there’s one thing that can help you to discover exciting new opportunities or assist you in figuring out your true passion in life, it’s travel. Sometimes far away hills really are greener and you may be able to forge a better lifestyle for yourself in a distant land.


Trips to new parts of the globe can also be rejuvenating and reinvigorating, allowing you to return home feeling empowered to solve old problems or make a fresh start.


But sometimes you need a little outside inspiration to help you to overcome the powerful forces of fear and inertia that are holding you back from beginning that life-changing adventure you so desperately need to have.

That’s why we’ve scoured numerous books and the web to compile a list of these 71 inspirational travel quotes.

The quotes we’ve chosen originate from a wide variety of different authors who lived in many different eras, both past and present but whether old or new, these quotes all have the power to impart valuable wisdom and to inspire us to travel.


Hopefully, these quotes will really help to provide that impetus that many of you need to actually pack those bags, book that first flight and embark upon the journey of a lifetime.


Without further ado, here are the 71 powerful quotes that we hope will inspire you to start travelling:

1. ''If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.'' - Paul Coelho

2. ''The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.'' - Saint Augustine

3. ''We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.'' - John Hope Franklin

4. ''Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.'' - Helen Keller

5. ''One of the gladdest moments of human life methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy.'' - Richard Burton

6. ''If we were meant to stay in one place, we'd have roots instead of feet.'' - Rachel Wolchin

7. ''Only he that has traveled the road knows where the holes are deep.'' - Chinese Proverb

8. ''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

9. ''To move, to breath, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live.'' – Hans Christian Anderson

10. ''To travel is to evolve'' - Pierre Bernando

11. ''Travel is still the most intense mode of learning.'' – Kevin Kelly

12. ''Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.'' – Saber Ben Hassen

13. ''A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.'' - Lao Tzu

14. ''Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one’s lifetime.'' - Mark Twain

15.''Travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living.'' – Anonymous

16. ''I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question. '' - Harun Yahya

17. ''Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.'' – Asian Proverb

18. ''Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you travelled.'' - Mohammed

19. ''Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that 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

20. ''A person susceptible to "wanderlust" is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.'' - Pico Iyer

21. ''A mind that’s stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.'' - Oliver Wendell Holmes

22. ''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

23. ''Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.'' - Andre Gides

24. ''Heroes take journeys, confront dragons, and discover the treasure of their true selves.'' - Carol Pearson

25. ''Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.'' - Scott Cameron

26. ''A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.'' - John A. Shedd

27. ''Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage'' - Paulo Coelho

28. ''Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.'' - Henry David Thoreau

29. ''Not all those who wander are lost'' - J.R.R Tolkien.

30. ''Travel. It leaves you speechless then turns you into a storyteller.'' - Ibn Battuta

31. ''We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.'' - Anonymous

32. ''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.” - Casare Pavese

33. ''To travel is to take a journey into yourself.'' - Danny Kaye

34. ''The only trip you will regret is the one you don't take.'' – Anonymous

35.''We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls'' - Anais Nin

36. ''The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.'' - Agnes Replier

37. ''Travel far enough, you meet yourself.'' – David Mitchell

38. ''I don’t know the question, but travel is definitely the answer.'' – Anonymous

39. ''Travelling. It gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.'' - Ibn Battuta

40. ''And then there is the most dangerous risk of all - the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later.'' - Randy Komisar

41. ''I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.'' - Mary Anne Radmacher

42. ''To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.'' - Elizabeth Gilbert

43. ''Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.'' - Neale Donald Walsch

44. ''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 Rebel Angels

45. ''Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.'' - Anatole France

46. "Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen." - Louis L' Amour

47. "I would rather own little and see the world, than own the world and see little of it" - Alexander Sattler

48. ''Jobs fill your pocket. Adventures fill your soul.'' - Jaime Lyn Beatty

49. ''Experience, travel - these are an education in themselves.'' - Euripedes

50. ''People wait all week for Friday, all year for summer, all life for happiness... I travel.'' - Anonymous

51. ''We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.'' - Joseph Campbell

52. ''Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.'' - Isabelle Eberhardt

53. ''To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.'' - Freya Stark

54. ''For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.'' - Isabelle Eberhardt

55. ''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

56. ''She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city.’’ - Roman Payne

57. “Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.” – Irving Wallace

58. ''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 colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.'' – Terry Pratchett

59. ''The world is not in your books and maps. It’s out there.’' - Gandalf, The Hobbit

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

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

62. ''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

63. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” – Mark Jenkins   

64.  “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  

65. ''Oh the places you’ll go.'' - Dr. Seuss   

66. “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

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

68. ''Freedom lies in being bold.'' - Robert Frost

69. ‘I met a lot of people in Europe. I even encountered myself. ‘ – James  Baldwin

70. “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   

71. ''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.''

A final word

We hope that reading through this list of quotes has sparked something inside of you and has perhaps inspired you to begin your next or perhaps first big travel adventure. 


Please leave a comment below and tell us which one was your favourite. Also, do you have a travel quote of your own that you'd like to share? If so, please do so.

Liked this article?

Stay in touch! Get FREE e-mail updates and exclusive travel tips & hints delivered straight to your inbox. Just enter your details below and hit the green button to join.