50 Great Travel Quotes for Inspiration!

Some people find quotes a little “cheesy,” or too cliche.  Personally, I happen to love quotes about travel, freedom, & the wild.  Words are powerful.  And I think that hearing the right quote, at the right time, can create an “A-HA!” moment.  Which is why I’ve gathered this collection of 50 great travel quotes for inspiration ~ any time you need a little extra wisdom & guidance in your life.  

Off to Find Great Travel Quotes…

50 Great Travel Quotes for Inspiration

1) “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends…the mind can never break off from the journey.”

~ Pat Conroy, Author of The Prince of Tides 

2) “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”

~ Joseph Campbell

3) “Travel.  As much as you can.  As far as you can.  As long as you can.  Life is not meant to be lived in one place.” ~ Unknown

4) “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” ~ Anonymous

5) “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” ~ Seneca, Letters from a Stoic

6) “Travel is rebellion in its purest form.  We follow our heart.  We free ourselves of labels.  We trade a role for reality.  We love the unfamiliar.  We trust strangers.  We own only what we can carry.  We search for better questions, not answers.  We truly graduate.  We, sometimes, choose never to come back.”

~ Unknown  

7) “Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed.  That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”

~ Pico Iyer, Author of Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

8) “Jobs fill your pocket.  Adventures fill your soul.” ~ Unknown

9) “Don’t listen to what they say.  Go see.” ~ Ancient Chinese Proverb

10) “Once a year, go some place you’ve never been before.” ~ Dalai Lama 

Great Travel Quotes by Women

I am endlessly inspired by other women: writers, travelers, journeyers.  Wanderesses.  Modern-day muses.  Perhaps I’ll expand on this section at another time, but for now, enjoy these great travel quotes from some extraordinary women.

11) “Traveling is the great true love of my life.  I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old & first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.  I am loyal & constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal or constant in my other loves.  I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless newborn baby ~ I just don’t care what it puts me through.  Because I adore it.  Because it’s mine.  Because it looks exactly like me.  It can bark all over me if it wants to ~ I just don’t care.”

~ Elizabeth Gilbert, from Eat, Pray, Love

12) “Do not cringe & make yourself small if you are called the black sheep, the maverick, the lone wolf.  Those with slow-seeing say a nonconformist is a blight on society.  But it has been proven over the centuries, that being different means standing at the edge, means one is practically guaranteed to make an original…a useful & stunning contribution to her culture.”

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from Women Who Run with the Wolves (one of the greatest books ever written)

13) “I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.  I decided I was safe.  I was strong.  I was brave.”

~ Cheryl Strayed, from Wild 

14) “If you’re brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting…and set out on a truth-seeking journey…and if you are truly willing to regard everything that happens to you on that journey as a clue, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher…and if you are prepared, most of all, to face some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.”

~ Elizabeth Gilbert, from Eat, Pray, Love

15) “Put the phone down.  Shut the computer screen.  Make out.  French kiss.  Drink a glass of wine.  Drink a bottle of wine.  Hold hands.  Lock eyes.  Dance in the middle of the living room.  Belly laugh.  Don’t forget the small stuff.  Ever.”

~ Lesley Anne Murphy, Travel Blogger of the Road Les Traveled  

16) “When seeking guidance, don’t ever listen to the tiny-hearted.  Be kind to them, heap them with blessing, cajole them, but do not follow their advice.” ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from Women Who Run with the Wolves

17) “She was free in her wildness.  She was a wanderess, a drop of free water.  She knew nothing of borders and cared nothing for rules or customs.” ~ Roman Payne, from The Wanderess 

18) “There is something intriguing & hypnotizing about the regal wild woman ~ the one who is willing to fling herself face-first into a flirtation with adventure & vulnerability.  She captivates the world with her bravery, confidence, and contagious energy.  Yes, she is a feisty & irresistible rebel.  Often times, this type of woman is willing to go against the grain, redefine societal norms…in order to achieve her desired freedom & need for adventure.  The solo female adventurer has become the modern-day muse.  Men love us, but may understandably be intimidated by us for our fiery personalities.  There are many reasons to love the wild woman, for she is more than willing to run wild with you too.”

~ Words by @lauraaatheexplorer, courtesy of Micaela Shalane, a Modern-Day Muse

19) “You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.” ~ Karen Blixen, from Out of Africa 

20) “Never lose your childish enthusiasm and things will come your way.”

~ Frances Mayes, from Under the Tuscan Sun

21) “Certainly, 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

22) “Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere.” – Mae West

23) “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.” ~ Anais Nin

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

25) “The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.” ~ Albert Einstein

26) “I am willing to put myself through anything, temporary pain or discomfort means nothing to me as long as I can see that the experience will take me to a new level. I am interested in the unknown, and the only path to the unknown is through breaking barriers, an often painful process.” ~ Diana Nyad

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

28) “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species. [Wild Woman] canalizes through women.  If they are suppressed, she struggles upward.  If women are free, she is free.  Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again.  No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, & other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for her.  Even the most repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts & secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural.  Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wild-ish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, by chance, and she will hightail it to escape.”

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes, from Women Who Run with the Wolves

29) ” Each time a woman stands up for herself, without knowing it possibly, without claiming it, she stands up for all women.” ~ Maya Angelou

30) “As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” ~ Virginia Woolf

31) “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do.  But I knew the woman I wanted to become.”

~ Diane von Furstenberg, The Woman I Wanted to Be 

Great Travel Quotes on Wilderness

32) “All good things in life are wild & free.”  ~ Henry David Thoreau, from Walden

33) “So many people live within unhappy circumstances & yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, & conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”

~ Christopher McCandless, from Jon Krakauer’s book, Into the Wild 

34) “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 & different sun.” ~ Christopher McCandless

35) “It should not be denied…that being footloose has always exhilarated us.  It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west.” ~ Wallace Stegner, from The American West as Living Space

36) “For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings…”

~ Edward Abbey, from Desert Solitaire

37) “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.

~ Henry David Thoreau, from the classic, Walden

38) “Going to the mountains is going home.” ~ John Muir, Founder of the Sierra Club

39) “A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel & exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea…Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it.  And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams & know that we have sinned against ourselves greatly.”

~ Tim Cahill, from Exotic Places Made Me Do It

40) “People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life.  I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking.  I think what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive.” ~ Joseph Campbell, from The Power of Myth

41) “The world is wilder in all directions, more dangerous & bitter, more extravagant & bright.  We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain and Lazarus.”

~ Annie Dillard, from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

42) “Twenty years from now, you’ll be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”

~ Mark Twain 

43) “As it stands, motherhood is a sort of wilderness through which each woman hacks her way, part martyr, part pioneer; a turn of events from which some women derive feelings of heroism, while others experience a sense of exile from the world they knew.” ~ Rachel Cusk, from A Life’s Work: Becoming a Mother 

44) “In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States, on the importance our National Parks 

45) “We must assume our existence as broadly as we can in any way we can.  Everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it.  That is at the bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular & the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”

~ Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letter to a Young Poet

46) “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”

~ Jack Kerouac, from the classic, On the Road 

47) “Allons!  The road is before us!  It is safe ~ I have tried it ~ my own feet have tried it well ~ be not detain’d!  Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!  Let the tools remain in the workshop!  Let the money remain unearn’d!  Comerado, I give you my hand!  I give you my love more precious than money, I give you myself before preaching or law; Will you give me yourself?  Will you come travel with me?”

~ Walt Whitman, from a Song of the Open Road

48) “Re-examine all that you have been told….dismiss that which insults your soul.” ~ Walt Whitman

49) “Do not go where the path may lead….go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson 

50) “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

50 Great Travel Quotes for Inspiration!

I hope you’ve acquired some newfound energy & sustenance from these 50 great travel quotes for inspiration.  And I will leave you with this final quote, from an all-time classic book about adventure & travel, by the ever-wise Dr. Seuss: 

“You’re off to great places!  Today is your day!  

Your mountain is waiting, so….Get on your way!”  

Read Next: Female Travel Videos to Inspire Your Next Trip!

xoxo Noelia

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