The Best Travel quotes to awaken the Nomad in you!
It is early morning and I am sitting on the back of a beautiful boat anchored just outside the Marina Cabo San Lucas, enjoying an amazing French Press of Coffee. Sometime in the middle of the night three new sailboats arrived from The Newport Beach to Cabo regatta. I can hear the sailors telling stories all around me; the usual conversation about how long it took to get here, and what troubles they ran into along the way.
As I watch the sunrise I see the fisherman head out for the day, some with tourist to land that fish of a lifetime, and others going to work to provide food for the family. It reminds me of a great travel quote. “Not all those who wander are lost.” J. R. R. Tolkien
Today is the end of this journey and to be honest I miss my home, my wife, and my life. You see when you have been away for a long period of time the excitement fades, and your journey can start to feel more like work and less like adventure.
So I decided to do a little research and make a list of some of my favorite travel quotes. As I started to make the list the more I read the more my attitude changed. Something happened deep inside me, the Nomad that was sleeping had awoken and I went from yearning for the comfort of my bed to thinking about where it is that I want or need to go next and exactly how am I going to get there. I hope you enjoy them and if you have a quote to add please do so I would love to read it.
These are in no particular order so here we go…
- “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” Lillian Smith
- “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” Lao Tzu
- “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
- “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” Charles Dudley Warner
- “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” James Michener
- “The journey not the arrival matters.” T. S. Eliot
- “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” Tim Cahill
- “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
- “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” Pat Conroy
- “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
- “Not all those who wander are lost.” J. R. R. Tolkien
- “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” Benjamin Disraeli
- “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” Lin Yutang
- “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
- “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
- “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Henry Miller
- “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” Mark Twain
- “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” St. Augustine
- “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Martin Buber
- “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
- “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” Paul Theroux
- “Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.” Francis Bacon
- “When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.” Robert A. Heinlein
- “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
- “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” Kurt Vonnegut
- “It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse. “ William Hazlitt
- “To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change. “ Charles Horton Cooley
- “I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” Hilaire Belloc
- “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me” Sigmund Freud
- “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
- “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
- “Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by.” Robert Frost
- “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” Lao Tzu
- “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
- “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” Elizabeth Drew
- “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe” Anatole France
- “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” Seneca
- “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
- “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
- “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
- “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” Robert Louis Stevenson
- “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
- “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” – Moorish proverb
- “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” Dagobert D. Runes
- “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” John Steinbeck
- “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
- “A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” Moslih Eddin Saadi
- “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” – D. H. Lawrence
- “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” Freya Stark
- “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
- “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
- “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” Rudyard Kipling
- “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” Paul Theroux
- “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
- “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
- “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” Carlo Goldoni
- “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” Mark Jenkins
- “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering. “ Saint Augustine
- “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” Martin Buber
- “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” G.K. Chesterton
- “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” Buddha
- “Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” Ernest Hemingway
As I sit here in the Cabo airport finishing this article (Bloody Mary in hand) watching all the different cultures, and people either ending their travel or beginning there adventure. I can’t help but think, I wonder how much it would be to switch my flight from LAX to that flight to Guadalajara…
I have to give credit to Lola Akinmade and Tim Patterson of the Matador Network, and Book of Famous Quotes for a great deal of my insight on this list.