55+ Travel Quotes for Those Who Wander

The sand between your toes or the mountains towering above your head: we work most weeks of the year so that for two, we can travel. And in between our vacations, all we can do is look up travel quotes and reminisce about the experience of exploration.
If you too are wishing you could board a plane right now, here are some quotes to inspire you while you wait.
Quotes About the Difference Between a Tourist and a Traveler
If you’re a seasoned traveler, you probably sneer when you see “tourists.” Here are some travel quotes that really delve into the difference between a traveler and a tourist.
“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.”
– G.K. Chesterton
“The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin
“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”
– Paul Theroux
“A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.”
– Emile Genest
“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.”
– Susan Sontag
“My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.”
– Ryszard Kapuscinski
“A tourist follows a trail; a mountaineer finds one.”
– Reinhold Messner
“The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.”
– Agnes Repplier
Quotes About How Travel Changes You
A lot of people consider travel a life-changing experience. It gives you a whole new perspective on the world and your place in it. Here are some travel quotes that illuminate the importance of travel in your development as an individual.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”
– Mark Twain
“Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
– Gustave Flaubert
“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries”
– Aldous Huxley
“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”
– Mary Anne Radmacher
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
– Ibn Battuta
“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
“People who don’t travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what’s in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.”
– Martin Yan
“It is probably a pity that every citizen of each state cannot visit all the others, to see the differences, to learn what we have in common, and come back with a richer, fuller understanding of America – in all its beauty, in all its dignity, in all its strength, in support of moral principles.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
“Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves.”
– Euripides
Choose to Travel Quotes
There are so many excuses not to travel. I don’t have time, I’d rather spend money on something else, or it’s too much work. These quotes remind you that it’s important to make travel a priority in your life.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do”
– H. Jackson Brown Jr
“Paris is always a good idea.”
– Audrey Hepburn
“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
“Once a year, go some place you’ve never been before.”
– Dalai Lama
“Nothing lasts forever, except the day before you start your vacation.”
– Gayland Anderson
“A year from now, you will wish you had started today.”
– Karen Lamb
“Life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.”
– Simon Raven
“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.”
– Anthony Bourdain
“An investment in travel is an investment into yourself.”
– Matthew Karsten
“Sometimes one day in a different place gives you more than ten years of life at home.”
– Anatole France
“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.”
— Mark Twain
Born to Travel Quotes
Some people just feel like they were born to wander. Here are some quotes for those that feel like travel is in their blood.
“If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” – Rachel Wolchin
“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
“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
“The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life”
– Agnus Ripplier
Be Brave and Travel Quotes
Traveling can overwhelm you. Trying something new can feel intimidating. But choosing to be brave and travel despite your fears makes the experience all the more valuable.
“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
– John A. Shedd
“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.”
– Anthony Bourdain
“It is a big and beautiful world. Most of us live and die in the same corner where we were born and never get to see any of it. I don’t want to be most of us.”
– Oberyn Martell, Game of Thrones
“Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.”
—Regina Nadelson
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
– Paul Theroux
“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
Why We Travel Quotes
We travel for more reasons than getting Instagram photo ops. Travel educates us on the world and shows us more about ourselves. Here are some great travel quotes about why you should travel.
“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
“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
“Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.”
– Benjamin Disraeli
“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
“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.”
– Anita Desai
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves.”
– Pico Iyer
Short Travel Quotes
Want something short and sweet to caption your throwback Insta post? Want a short travel quote to get tattooed? Here are some shorter quotes about travel that you can enjoy.
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles”
– Tim Cahill
“Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.”
– Ray Bradbury
“A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.”
— Moslih Eddin Saadi
“Travel expands the mind and fills the gap.”
– Sheda Savage
“Travelling tends to magnify all human emotions.”
– Peter Hoeg
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
– Saint Augustine
Inspirational Travel Quotes
If you need a push to get yourself to travel, here are some inspirational quotes to get you on that plane.
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”
– Anatole France
“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.”
– Jawaharial Nehru
“I have worn the dust of many foreign streets, but to brush it off would surely be a crime. I have the memories of many foreign adventures, but to forget them, would surely be a sin. So, breath in the dust, and keep the memories in.”
– Rowland Waring-Flood
“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
The Best Travel Quotes
Traveling the world changes your mindset. You get a clearer perspective on your place in the world and an appreciation for the beauty on this earth.
So where will you travel next? What are your favorite travel quotes? Tell us in the comments!
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