33 Travel Quotes to Inspire You: Open Your Mind, Get off the Couch & Move

When I was younger, I used to keep a quote book. I filled it with quotes I liked, passages from books that I found inspiring, and also just funny things people said in real life. It’s a wonderful little slice of who I was back then and a window into what I found interesting, silly, inspirational at the time.

Sometimes I’ll pick it up and read it today - and it’s a nice trip down memory lane. It houses many quotes from high school friends that I am still close with to this day (including my current boyfriend!!)

Having always loved quotes, I thought I would share a few travel quotes to inspire you to “open your mind, get off the couch, and move” (as Anthony Bourdain would say).

Short Travel Quotes….

Guatemala, Pacaya Volcano Hike

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

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

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
― Lao Tzu

Bali, Ubud at Monkey Forest Sanctuary

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

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

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

Chiang Mai, Thailand at Patara Elephant Farm (Elephant “Owner” For a Day Experience)

“Travel brings power and love back into your life.”
― Rumi Jalalud-Din

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

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton

Kawasan Falls, Philippines (Cliff Diving Tour) - one of the happiest days of my life! MUST DO activity.

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

“To travel is to live.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairytale of My Life: An Autobiography

“To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

“So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don't be sorry”
― Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels

El Nido, Philippines = Paradise on Earth

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
― Mark Twain

Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
― Anthony Bourdain

Medium to Long Quotes….

“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, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

Bali Swing, Bali

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

“I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
― Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

Teotihuacán (Aztec Ruins) just outside Mexico City

“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.”
― Judith Thurman

“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, Night Train to Lisbon

“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here Now There: Travels in Europe

“Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. 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

“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 McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.”
― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Quito, Ecuador

“There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: In Search for the Great Perhaps

“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, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

“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.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour

Quito, Ecuador

“No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, Hear Fearful Symmetry

Christ the Redeemer, Brazil

“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.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru

“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.

“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”
― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel

“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, A Place on Earth

Medellin, Colombia

“The farther you go, however, the harder it is to return. The world has many edges, and it's easy to fall off.”
― Anderson Cooper

“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..”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“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.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook’s Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines