Lots of people love a good travel quote. In fact, over 5 million people mistakenly type “travel wuotes” into Pinterest per month—it’s almost as if they’re so excited to find awesome travel quotes that they can’t help but type too quickly!
Travel quotes can, in a strange way, make one feel fulfilled even if they’re not currently traveling. Vicarious travel is a real thing. For others, travel quotes can give them confidence or emotional justification to purchase that cheap pair of plane tickets they’ve been eyeballing for some time.
Other people like travel quotes because of the lessons they can learn from them, And, conversely, others find travel quotes a bit empty and meaningless; lofty sounding words that are actually just a kind of pseudo-wisdom. The old stereotypical adage, of course, is that you find yourself by traveling. To be honest, that kind of motto, if meant definitively, ruffles my feathers too! Travel is what you make it to be, and I hardly think it’s necessary to leave your country in order to become a better person.
Travel can change you for the better, and sometimes for the worse. The key thing to realize it’s that it’s up to you. Travel can be life-changing if you do it properly. So I guess, after all, there is some truth to the “find yourself by traveling” motto.
Here are 15 slightly nuanced travel quotes that, while we hope still inspires your travels, more importantly, will change how you think about travel and how you do it.
1. “Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine of Hippo
3. “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, sea, the sky—all things tending towards the eternal…” – Cesare Pavese
4. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
5. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see. 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.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton
6. “Jobs fill your pocket, but adventures fill your soul.” – Jamie Lyn Beatty
7. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
8. “We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.” – Ray Bradbury
9. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T.S. Eliot
10. “I travel because it makes me realize how much I haven’t seen, how much I’m not going to see, and how much I still need to see.” – Carew Papritz
11. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
12. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustav Flaubert
13. “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
14. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag
15. “It feels good to be lost in the right direction.” – Unknown
Suggested next reading: Why You Need To Ditch The Noise & Escape Into Silence ASAP
