Fifty Best Travel Quotes

I love the power that words have to inspire, motivate and engage the reader, words that are immortalised, words of wit, pain, and truth; to the writer, if not always the reader. Many a writer, intellectual, artist or traveller has made comment on the virtue of travel, a subject of which most of our readers are obviously passionate. I have collated below a selection of fifty of my favourite travel quotes, some may strike a chord, but please add your own favourites in the comments box below the article; who can come up with a modern version of a classic quote, or even better their own inspirational original. These quotes are not arranged in a particular order of favouritism:

1 ‘We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.’ – Hilaire Belloc

2 ‘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 Paul Fadiman

3 ‘All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.’ – Samuel Johnson

4 ‘There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.’ – Robert Louis Stevenson

5 ‘For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return. ‘ – Leonardo da Vinci

6 ‘The World is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.’ – Saint Augustine

7 ‘Travel teaches toleration.’ – Benjamin Disraeli

8 ‘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

9 ‘Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.’ – Francis Bacon

10 ‘Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.’ – Thomas Fuller

11 ‘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

12 ‘I’ve met the most interesting people while flying or on a boat. These methods of travel seem to attract the kind of people I want to be with.’ – Hedy Lamarr

13 ‘The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere.’ – Xun Zi

14 ‘The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it.’ – Lord Chesterfield

15 ‘Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

16 ‘An English man does not travel to see English men.’ – Laurence Sterne

17 ‘To travel is to take a journey into yourself.’ – Danny Kaye

18 ‘What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.’ – George Byron

19 ‘In America there are two classes of travel – first class, and with children.’ – Robert Benchley

20 ‘No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.’ – Lin Yutang

21 ‘We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.’ – Maria Mitchell

22 ‘A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.’ – John Steinbeck

23 ‘Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.’ – Greg Anderson

24 ‘Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.’ – Benjamin Disraeli

25 ‘Not all those who wander are lost.’ – J. R. R. Tolkien

26 ‘The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.’ – Rudyard Kipling

27 ‘Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.’ – Paul Theroux

28 ‘Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time. ‘ – Jerzy Kosinski

29 ‘He travels fastest who travels alone.’ H.D. Thoreau

30 ‘The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.’ – Don Williams Jr.

31 ‘Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’ – Lao Tzu

32 ‘A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.’ John Steinbeck

33 ‘Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.’ – James Madison

34 ‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’- Oscar Wilde

35 ‘Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.’ – Ernest Hemingway

36 ‘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

37 ‘Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.’ – Lewis Mumford

38 ‘The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.’ – Marshall McLuhan

39 ‘You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.’ – Ella Maillart

40 ‘If you reject the food, ignore the customs,
 fear the religion and avoid the people,
 you might better stay at home.’ – James Michener

41 ‘Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.’ – Alexander Chase

42 ‘Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.‘ – Al Boliska

43 ‘Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.’ – Charles Kuralt

44 ‘Room service? Send up a larger room.’ – Groucho Marx

45 ‘There was a girl knocking on my hotel room door all night! Finally, I let her out.’ – Henny Youngman

46 ‘I had moved out of the Edison Hotel because I couldn’t pay the bill and was living at the Lincoln Hotel, where I couldn’t pay the bill either, but it was cheaper.’ – Allan Sherman

47 ‘I pretend I’m one of the royal family when I’m in a hotel and that the hotel belongs to me – it is a palace.’ – Martin Short

48 ‘I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.’ – Steven Wright

49 ‘I’ve always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?’ – Anne Tyler

50 ‘Never relinquish clothing to a hotel valet without first specifically telling him that you want it back.’ – Fran Lebowitz

51 ‘The cool thing about being famous is travelling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.’ – Britney Spears (Geography lesson for Ms Spears please!)

52 ‘A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.’ – Lao Tzu

53 ‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.’ – Martin Buber

54 ‘Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all’ – Helen Keller

55 ‘Take only memories, leave only footprints’ – Chief Seattle Rehashed many times this quote is attributed to the Suquamish Chief after whom the city of Seattle was named, and an early advocate for environmentalism.

56 ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’ – Marcel Proust

57 ‘Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.’ – Gustave Flaubert

58 ‘Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.’ – Ernest Hemingway

59 ‘Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.’- Ibn Battuta

60 ‘If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it’s lethal.’ – Paulo Coehlo

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61 ‘Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey.’ – Babs Hoffman

62 ‘Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.’ – David McCullough

63 ‘Jobs fill your pocket but adventures fill your soul.’ – Jamie Lyn Beatty

What’s your favourite travel related quote? Please leave a comment below.