famous travel quotes and sayings
45 Famous Travel Quotes and Sayings
Traveling is as old as civilization itself, and the human race owes much of its progress to our innate desire to explore. Buzzle presents a list of inspirational travel quotes and sayings as an ode to our never-ending wanderlust.
Did You Know?
Tourism accounts for 5% of the world's GDP.
This statistic comes courtesy the United Nations Environment Programme, and for what it's worth, it's hardly surprising. It wouldn't be an overstatement to say that we owe our existence to that one ancestor who thought it was a good idea to explore other habitable regions in search of a better life―thus, birthing the concept of migration.
This list of inspiring travel quotes is not meant for those who have already been bitten by the travel bug. On the contrary, it is aimed at those who think it is bliss to be cocooned in the confines of their homes watching the Discovery Channel and merely aspiring to visit the places they see on TV. To these very people, all we wish to say is that traveling is the best teacher you can ever find, and no matter how preachy we become, our words will never match up to those said by some very illustrious personalities. Read them, follow them, and then act upon them.
Travel to broaden your horizons
"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
― Robert Louis Stevenson
"Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art."
― Freya Stark
Yes indeed, Paris is always a good idea. The capital of France has long been the center of cultural revolutions, attracting intelligentsia from all over the world. Today, Paris is the epicenter of all things refined and luxe, but this does not take anything away from its glorious past. Deriving inspiration from Audrey Hepburn's words, Paris does merit a visit in a lifetime.
"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe."
― Anatole France
"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
"See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security."
― Ray Bradbury
"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
― Aldous Huxley
"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."
― Gilbert K. Chesterton
"They say no land remains to be discovered, no continent is left unexplored. But the whole world is out there, waiting, just waiting for me. I want to do things ― I want to walk the rain-soaked streets of London, and drink mint tea in Casablanca. I want to wander the wastelands of the Gobi desert and see a yak. I think my life's ambition is to see a yak. I want to bargain for trinkets in an Arab market in some distant, dusty land. There's so much. But, most of all, I want to do things that will mean something."
― Lisa Ann Sandell
"The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home - and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries."
― Rolf Potts
Travel to learn something new
"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page."
― St. Augustine
No matter how massive our materialistic achievements may be, there is nothing more humbling than getting out of our cocooned nest to see the world. Wish to experience this feeling? We suggest a trip to Indonesia, where you can hike up to the massif of Mount Bromo, an active volcano in East Java.
"The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
― Lao Tzu
"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls."
― Anaïs Nin
"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
"Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world."
― Gustave Flaubert
"One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."
― Henry Miller
"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
There are many facets to living on an island, and we're not referring to the Long Island-type of island here. Communities living on smaller and remote islands have a distinct culture and lifestyle which is a true homage to the concept of living in sync with nature. Wish to experience it? Sail off to the Seychelles, a gem of an island nation in the Indian Ocean.
"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
"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
"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
"Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God."
― Kurt Vonnegut
"Paris is always a good idea."
― Audrey Hepburn
"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
"He who does not travel does not know the value of men."
― Moorish proverb
"A wise man travels to discover himself."
― James Russell Lowell
"Foreign lands never yield their secrets to a traveller. The best they offer are tantalising snippets, just enough to inflame the imagination. The secrets they do reveal are your own - the ones you have kept from yourself. And this is reason enough to travel, to leave home."
― Graeme Sparkes
Travel to become bold
"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
"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
― John A. Shedd
New Zealand is home to one of the most breathtaking natural settings in the world. But then, you wouldn't really know this for yourself unless you visit this beautiful and welcoming nation. Well, Lake Tekapo on New Zealand's South Island is waiting to blow your mind.
"Once a year go somewhere you have never been before."
― Dalai Lama
"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
― Jack Kerouac
"He who is outside his door has the hardest part of his journey behind him."
― Dutch Proverb
"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. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it."
― Cesare Pavese
"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
"If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home."
― James Michener
"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
Did we mention how beautiful our planet actually is? Well, it doesn't matter if we have, because any number of repetitions are worth it, if they do inspire you to explore our world. As a pictorial incentive, we're giving you a snapshot taken in Torres del Paine National Park, Patagonia, Chile.
Travel to become one with the world
"The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see."
― G.K. Chesterton
"I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful."
― Justina Chen
"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
"Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down."
― Ryū Murakami
"Travel far enough, you meet yourself."
― David Mitchell
"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
Ah! The grandeur of a gorgeous sunset can turn many a skeptic into a poet of sorts. Agreed, sunsets have been reduced to somewhat of a cliché , no thanks to Instagram, but believe us when we say that each place lends a bit of its charm to a sunset, just like this divine color-play happening at the Santa Monica Pier.
"Travel teaches toleration."
― 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
"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
― Mary Anne Radmacher
"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
"Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life."
― Paul Theroux