Travel Quotes

A little piece of everywhere I go becomes a big part of everything I do.

~ Richie Norton

I know, in my soul, that a love for travel is a gift and not a hindrance. It feels like a burden when the bucket list is bigger than the bank account, but a thirst for more of the world is not something to apologize for. Denying its presence feels like denying something good in me, something God put there. Wanderlust has a reputation as the epitome of unrequited love, something the young and naive chase after because they don’t yet realize it’s as futile as a dog chasing its tail. Turns out, ever-burning wanderlust is a good thing.

~ Tsh Oxenreider

Never have a plan, it'll just get in your way.

~ Marty Rubin

Meandering cows, tenacious bicyclers, belching taxis, rickshaws, fearless pedestrians and the occasional mobile ‘cigarette and sweets’ stand all fought our taxi for room on the narrow two-lane road turned local byway.

~ Jennifer S. Alderson

To find truth, one must travel a dense fog!

~ David Dweck

This for me was home, and for the visitors, Kashmir.

~ Irfan Nabi

Do you know what the luckiest thing is?’‘No.’‘It is to be at home everywhere.

~ Ben Okri

Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.

~ Ben Okri

When we’ve been travelling around I’ve often thought: Oh, this would be a good place to be, and that would be an excellent place to live. And yet, after I’ve seen everything I’ve decided that home, wherever that may be, is the place for feelings of peace. And if I can be at peace with myself then that is the most important thing. I think travelling teaches one that.

~ Ben Okri

O enchanted land of my childhood, a cultural petri dish from which regularly issues forth greatness. New Jersey, in case you didn't know it, has got beaches. And they're not all crawling with roid-raging trolls with reality shows. I grew up summering on those beaches and they are awesome. Jersey's got farmland, beautiful bedroom communities where that woman from Real Housewives who looks like Dr. Zaius does not live nor anyone like her. Even the refineries, the endless cloverleaves of turnpikes and expressway twisting and unknowable patterns over the wetlands that are to me somehow beautiful. To know Jersey is to love her.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Human inertia induces us to believe that our lives will never change unless we relocate.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

I ended up in the back seat of a chicken truck’s cab heading through beautiful scenery and disastrous roads to my hotel. About an hour later, we stopped to sell a few hundred of the chickens to a butcher shop.

~ Jennifer S. Alderson

Bowen looked nervously about for peasants. It would be unendurable if they all turned out to be full of instinctive wisdom and natural good manners and unself-conscious grace and a deep, articulate understanding of death.

~ Kingsley Amis

The idea and experience of travel can mean many things: it involves movement of some kind, sometimes through unknown places, at other times just between home and the world. Journeys can also be inward, marking rites of passage or a growth into a new dimension. We travel in search of profit, pleasure or curiosity, to labour and survive, to flee from tyranny or sorrow, and into real and imagined utopias.

~ Teju Behan

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.“Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

~ Rebecca Solnit

I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air - air you can kiss - and palms.

~ Jack Kerouac

No baggage - there was the secret of existence.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

And it certainly wasn’t a choice without risk. But then very few worthwhile things in life are. The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

~ Heather Hackett

At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are.

~ Alain De Botton

I learnt a lot from the simple lives our friends lived. I saw them living with so much less than we, as westerners, were used to. I couldn't even begin to imagine how to prepare a meal for four people using a bucket, one saucepan and a wok. More than likely, I would have been outraged if asked to do so. I can hear myself saying words to the effect of, ‘Bugger off! Let’s just get take out.’ Anyone who knew me would have known better than to ask.

~ Heather Hackett

Despite 4,000 years of proven usefulness, quarantines seem to be to modern international public health experts as garlic is to a vampire.

~ T.k. Naliaka

Travel is the treasure of time.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I can go on the road - because I can come home. I come home - because I'm free to leave. Each way of being is more valued in the presence of the other. This balance between making camp and following the seasons is both very ancient and very new. We all need both.

~ Gloria Steinem

With the selfies, a photographer has finally found his place in a photograph.

~ Amit Kalantri

The true adventurer sees his glass as half full even when there are things swimming in it.

~ Randy Ross

Looking at these photographs, I know that I will never understand the world I live in or fully know the places I've been. I've learned for sure only what I don't know - and how much I have to learn.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Those who don't belong to any specific place can't, in fact, return anywhere.

~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Being a maverick traveller, one would like to place oneself in the place of a local; just listen without judgement.

~ Mary Jane Walker

His diaries had begun to assume something of the knowingness of incipient middle age; at times, indeed, he was in danger of becoming priggish and opinionated. As with many later European voyagers, travel in this part of the world, far from broadening the mind, seemed instead to lead to a blanket distrust of anyone of a different creed, colour or class.

~ William Dalrymple

All I have is a life's worth of school days. What came before school I can't remember. You can only sketch so many desks and teachers and chalkboards. You can only come home to so many dinners and homework assignments and nights of taking the garbage out. You can only go to so many museum field trips before you start to wonder, Is this it?

~ Nina Lacour

A journey - whether it's to the corner grocery or through life - is supposed to have a beginning, middle, and end, right? Well, the road is not like that at all. It's the very illogic and the juxtaposed differences of the road - combined with our search for meaning - that make travel so addictive.

~ Gloria Steinem

Everywhere, I have travel to, I felt loved.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

In the Balkans the peasants say that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you are born under A LILAC-BLEEDING STAR.

~ Lesley Blanch

I took only one suitcase, and a cosmetics case for medicines but I was worried about books. Solitude is all right with books, awful without.

~ Martha Gellhorn

When I visit someplace new my favorite thing to do is eat...and walk, preferable to a place where I can eat some more.

~ Jessica Fechtor

Be brave. You didn't travel this far to languish within the walls of your comfortable self.

~ Sandra Vischer

The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we can see far enough

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

... none had been outside Russia. I kept trying to remember something that I had read about a species of fish that was born, lived, spawned, died in the dark waters of a cave; and were blind.

~ Martha Gellhorn

Our hearts are light and gay because now its happening, we're starting, we're travelling again.

~ Martha Gellhorn

My greatest pleasure is to travel down an unfamiliar road.

~ Marty Rubin