143 Awesome Quotes About Travel & Best Travel Captions For Instagram

Are you looking for quotes about travel to inspire your travel plans? Well, you’re in luck, as this post is packed with 143 inspirational travel quotes, from the popular to the obscure.

Whether you’re hoping to find captions, short quotes about travel, or words of wisdom from well-known names, this vast collection has plenty of choices.

Ready to get started? Well, grab a cuppa and jump right in!

In this (very long) post, you’ll find an A-Z by the authors of all the best travel quotes from famous names, well-known travellers and writers, like Anthony Bourdain, Paul Theroux and JRR Tolkien.

If you’re looking for travelling quotes in English, you’ll find many unique travel quotes, travel memories quotes, adventure travel quotes, fun travel quotes, and quotes about travelling the world right here.

Feed Your Wanderlust with These 143 Quotes about Travel

Some of these travel quotes will be as familiar as a favourite old sweater; others may be new to you. It’s a long list, so put your feet up, dive in and pick your favourite of all of these quotes about travel.

Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.

“Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before.” Richard Aldington

Quotes to suit your travel style

Do you thrive on new adventures – always looking for somewhere new to visit and explore? Or are you most comfortable returning to a favourite place time after time – relishing in gaining a deep knowledge of that special place?

“Adventure isn’t hanging on a rope off the side of a mountain. Adventure is an attitude that we must apply to the day to day obstacles in life.” John Amatt

“Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it feels like slow travel.” Greg Anderson

“To travel is to live .” Hans Christian Andersen

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

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

Is this one of the ultimate quotes about travel? One to explain what drives digital and global nomads to roam the planet. A “safe” job is not everyone’s idea of a fulfilled life.

“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

“How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!” Walter Benjamin

“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.” Wendell Berry

“Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.” Yogi Bhajan Quotes

“Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.” Bob Bitchin

“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” Lawrence Block

“My parents taught me honesty, truth, compassion, kindness and how to care for people. Also, they encouraged me to take risks, to boldly go. They taught me that the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure.” Brian Blessed

I almost didn’t include this travel quote! As a self-confessed grammar nerd, the split infinitive in the middle is painful, but I love the quote’s sentiment. And who doesn’t adore Brian Blessed, a.k.a. Hagrid?

Quotes About Travel from Anthony Bourdain

The irrepressible late American chef Anthony Bourdain was a prolific travel writer and part of his legacy is a vast portfolio of travel quotes. I’ve cherry-picked my favourites here.

“Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.”

“I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find the perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.”

“The journey is part of the experience – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.”

“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald’s? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”

“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.”

“I think food, culture, people and landscape are all absolutely inseparable.”

“It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn. Maybe that’s enlightenment enough – to know that there is no final resting place of the mind, no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom, at least for me, means realizing how small I am, and unwise, and how far I have yet to go.”

“I learned a long time ago that trying to micromanage the perfect vacation is always a disaster. That leads to terrible times.”

“Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund.”

“As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life – and travel – leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks – on your body or on your heart – are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.”

“When dealing with complex transportation issues, the best thing to do is pull up with a cold beer and let someone else sort it out”

“Food is everything we are. It’s an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It’s inseparable from those from the get-go.”

“It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there – with your eyes open – and lived to see it.”

“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”

“There’s something wonderful about drinking in the afternoon. A not-too-cold pint, absolutely alone at the bar – even in this fake-ass Irish pub.”

“I wanted adventures. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world and I wanted the world to be just like the movies.”

“Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.”

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

“We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.” Ray Bradbury

“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

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

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

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Albert Camers

“The only question in life is whether or not you are going to answer a hearty ‘YES! to your adventure.” Joseph Campbell

Adventure Travel Quotes by Paolo Coelho

“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it is lethal.”

“I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.”

“Once a year, go somewhere you have never been before.” Dalai Lama

“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.” Alan de Botton

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

“Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by traveling.” Miguel de Unamuno

“All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.” Walt Disney

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

“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” Amelia Earhart

“The journey is the destination.” Dan Eldon

“You must go on adventures to find out where you truly belong.” Sue Fitzmaurice

Poignant Travel Quotes by Gustave Flaubert

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

“It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.”

“Travel empties out everything you’ve put into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are.” Claire Fontaine

“Travel makes a wise man better and a fool worse.” Thomas Fuller

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

“You lose sight of things, and, when you travel, everything balances out.” Daranna Gidel

“Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” Ernest Hemingway

“Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.” Drew Houston

“You can’t control the past, but you can control where you go next.” Kirsten Hubbard

Inspirational Travel Quotes by Aldous Huxley

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

“Your true traveller 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.”

“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone because they reflect more.” Thomas Jefferson

“Adventure is a path. Real adventure, self-determined, self-motivated, often risky, forces you to have first-hand encounters with the world.” Mark Jenkins

“Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.” Ma Jian

“The journey is the reward.” Steve Jobs

You’re halfway through the list!

Did you find your favourite quote about travel yet?

Historical Travel Quotes by Samuel Johnson

“All travel has its advantages. If the traveller visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it”

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

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Helen Keller

Inspiring Quotes About Travel by Jack Kerouac

“Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry”

“We wandered in a frenzy and a dream”

“So, shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry”

“Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain”

“All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.” T. E. Lawrence

“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

“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end .” Ursula K Le Guin

“I am prepared to go anywhere provided it be forward.” David Livingstone

“The journey itself is my home.” Bashō Matsuo

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” Christopher McCandless

“We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” Pascal Mercier

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

Fun Adventure Quotes from AA Milne

“When you see someone putting on his big boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen.”

“As soon as I saw you, I knew an adventure was about to happen (Winnie the Pooh).”

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” David Mitchell

“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how far you have travelled.” Mohammed

“We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” Jawaharlal Nehru

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other soul.” Anais Nin

Quotes About Traveling by Cesare Pavese

“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 or what we imagine of it.”

“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.”

“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

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

“In books I have travelled, not only to other worlds, but also into my own.” Anna Quindlen

“I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.” Agnes Repplier

“The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.” J.A. Redmerski

“The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” Eleanor Roosevelt

“Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.” Ruth 1:16

“Oh, the places you’ll go.” Dr Seuss

“Travellers understand, instinctively and by experience, that travel and adventure change and elongate time, even while navigating the deadlines of airline and train departures.” Paul Sheehan

“There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” Beverly Sills

John Steinbeck Travel Quotes

“People don’t take trips, trips take people.”

Adventure Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

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

“There are no foreign lands, it is only the traveller who is foreign.”

“I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” Susan Sontag

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

Quotes About Travel by Paul Theroux

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

“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.”

Travel Quotes by Henry David Thoreau

“The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

JRR Tolkein Quotes About Adventure

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”

“All that is gold does not glitter; just as not all those who wander are lost.”

Quotes About Travel By Mark Twain

“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.”

“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.”

“A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” Lao Tzo

Unique Travel Quotes With an Unknown Origin

“Adventures don’t come calling like unexpected cousins calling from out of town. You have to go looking for them”

“Adventure Awaits. Go find it!

“Simply put, this is the story of my life”

“It feels good to be lost in the right direction.”

“Go, fly, roam, travel, voyage, explore, journey, discover, adventure.”

“What is life but one grand adventure?”

“One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.”

Of all the quotes about travel, this is one of my favourites because it really captures the spirit of the traveller in me. In a society obsessed with things and labels, it reminds us there’s more to life than the “stuff” we soon fall out of love with. Memories never grow old.

Even More Travel Quotes!

“When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.” Catherynne M Valente

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There is nothing else.” Tennessee Williams

“The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.” Oprah Winfrey

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

“No matter where you are, you’re always a bit on your own, always an outsider” Banana Yoshimoto

Final Thoughts About Travel Quotes

It was a real labour of love to curate and illustrate all of these inspirational travel quotes. I hope you love them as much as I do and that they inspire you to travel adventurously.

Did you know you can pin the images for these quotes too? If you haven’t already, why not scroll up, click on your favourites and pin away to your inspirational travel boards on Pinterest?

Related Posts

If you love using quotes or captions with emojis and hashtags to liven up your Instagram posts, you may also find some of the following posts helpful:

Pin For Later!

143 Awesome Quotes about Travel & Best Travel Captions For Instagram

Feed Your Wanderlust with These 143 Quotes about Travel

Quotes to suit your travel style

Quotes About Travel from Anthony Bourdain

Adventure Travel Quotes by Paolo Coelho

Poignant Travel Quotes by Gustave Flaubert