50 Inspirational Travel Quotes!

“I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown, eat interesting food, dig some interesting people, have an adventure, be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter… And that for some people, their day consists of walking twelve miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can’t get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people — Americans and Europeans — come back and go, “Ohhhh.” And the lightbulb goes on.”   —  Henry Rollins

But that’s not what the majority of young people do, now is it?  Nope, with acceptance letters to college in their hands and encouragement from parents, grandparents, counselors and friends they begin their careers. It’s college-job/cubicle/career in 4 short years.  They major in Liberal Arts, get a job, get married, buy a house, have children and work until you reach the gov’t specified retirement age.  Traveling before age 67 is seen as irresponsible.  Traveling with kids is seen as torture. To put off college for 1 year or to totally forgo college is perceived by others as a surefire road to failure.  When, in fact, it’s a surefire path to success.

It’s sort of like you don’t know what you don’t know … you know?  If you don’t know there’s a different way of living or a different path you can take, you simply do what everyone else is doing.  We want more for our kids than this.  Life is meant to be lived, experienced, and enjoyed.  Our kids eyes are being opened, their horizons broadened and their minds expanded because they are traveling.  Heck, my eyes are being opened.

I understand now why people stay with boring jobs or stick with the cubicle comas, why they schlep to work every morning, living for weekends and for their two weeks of vacations … I get it.  Unless you have serious drive, unless you have the perseverance and the tenacity to experience failure, it’s the easy way out.  Get a job, get hired, get told what to do … consistent paycheck making someone else rich.  But if you travel, if you experience the love of movement, the simplicity, the excitement, it will never be acceptable to live a sedentary life.  And so, you become creative, to avoid the pit that everyone else finds themselves in. This is where our older kids are.  A cubicle life is no more likely to be in their future than prison!  🙂

So, in hopes of encouraging more young people, more young families to travel let me, without further ado, present to you  50 awesome, inspiring, earth changing quotes.

1) It’s never too late to start over. If you weren’t happy with yesterday, try something different today. Don’t stay stuck. Do better.

2)  “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” Pico Iyer

3) “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

4) “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.” Cesare Pavese

5) “There’s an opposite to déjà vu. They call it jamais vu. It’s when you meet the same people or visit places, again and again, but each time is the first. Everybody is always a stranger. Nothing is ever familiar.” Chuck Palahniuk

6) “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

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

8) “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.” Mark Twain

9) “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” Lao Tzu

10) “Not all those who wander are lost.” J.R.R. Tolkien

11) “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” Mary Anne Radmacher

12) “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

13) “I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.” John Steinbeck

14) “Once a year go someplace you’ve never been before.” Dalai Lama

15) “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

16) “Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.” – Francis Bacon

17)  “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

18) “Travel teaches toleration.” – Benjamin Disraeli

19) “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

20)  “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

21)  “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G.K. Chesterton

22)  “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

23)  “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost

24)  “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

25)  “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” – Hilaire Belloc

26)  “I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.” – David Rockefeller

27)  “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

28)  “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.” – James Michener

29)  “The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” – Anna Quindlen

30)  “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

31)  “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Fitzhugh Mullan

32)  “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” – Mohammed

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

34)  “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.” – Jawaharal Nehru

35)  “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

36)  “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

37)  “A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.” – Emile Ganest

38)  “Adventure is worthwhile.” – Aristotle

39) “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

40) “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” – Paul Fussell 

41) “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb

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

43)  “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

44)  “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

45)  “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

48) “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float; to gain all while you give; to roam the roads of lands remote; to travel is to live.” ― Hans Christian Andersen

49) “Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut

50) “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.” – Unknown