80 Travel Quotes for When Wanderlust is Your Real Valentine
Happy Valentine’s Day! If you don’t already know, I’ve been single my whole life. While Galentine’s Day is for my favorite gal pals, Valentine’s Day is for love. And if I have to think about it, my true love at the moment is travel. So I thought I’d round up some of my favorite travel quotes to help illustrate why.
Use ’em for your next Instagram caption. Jot them on a handmade card. Do what you will with them. Just know that instead of buying a new outfit for a hot February 14th date, I spent time recording and researching 80+ quotes all about how much I love travel.
You’re welcome.
80 Travel Quotes to Help Explain the Obsession
Quotes with No Known Author
These are quotes I’ve seen all over Pinterest, tumblr, blogs, and more, and they don’t have any attribution or the author sometimes quoted doesn’t seem to exist. And this is after quite a few pages of Google searching with different Keyword variations. If you do know the original creator, please let me know, and I’ll edit.
1. For the ones who dream of stranger worlds.
2. Always take the scenic route.
3. Say yes to new adventures.
4. I want to make memories all over the world.
5. Don’t just exist, live.
6. Chase the sun.
7. Escape the ordinary.
8. Chase adventure.
9. Be a seeker of everyday magic.
10. Take me anywhere.
11. Let’s go somewhere where the stars kiss the ocean.
12. Born to chase the moonlight.
13. Oh darling, let’s be adventurers.
14. Go where you feel most alive.
15. And so the adventure begins.
16. Wander.
17. Wander often. Wonder always.
18. Collect beautiful moments.
19. Up in the clouds, on my way to unknown things.
20. Choose your own adventure.
21. You’ll never know until you go.
22. Escape and breathe the air of new places.
23. It feels good to be lost in the right direction.
24. Blessed are the curious for they will have adventures.
So… sometimes this one is attributed to someone named Lovelle Drachman, but when I tried to google who they were, nothing came up. If you know the name and can pinpoint it to a book, article, etc, let me know!
25. Find your wild.
26. Born to roam.
27. Put down the map and get wonderfully lost.
28. Adventure awaits.
29. Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.
30. Adventure is worthwhile.
This is another one sometimes attributed to Amelia Earhart or Aesop, but I couldn’t find any support for this.
Quotes with Authors
…Or from movies! These are quotes that do have an author, and I could track down where they came from. Surprisingly, many of them are completely misattributed all around the interwebs. You have no idea how many Google Book excerpts I’ve searched through to try and find not only the author but where s/he said or wrote it! I initially started listing them from my Pinterest board only to quickly realize how many of them were just wrong.
Other quotes are popular for one specific sentence, so I thought I’d expand on them a bit and find more context. Enjoy!
31. “I’ve heard her called a quitter for leaving and aimless wanderer. But not all who wander are aimless, especially those who seek truth beyond tradition, beyond definition, beyond the image.”
Hands down one of my absolute favorite quotes ever from one of my favorite movies ever. It’s spoken by Kirsten Dunst’s character at the end, and I always tear up.
32. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure…”
– Freya Stark, Baghdad Sketches
33. “…If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
– Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
34. “Once in a while, it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.”
– Alan Keightley, Into Every Life a Little Zen Must Fall
35. “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.”
– Shirley MacLaine, Don’t Fall Off the Mountain
36. “You don’t have to be rich to travel well.”
– Eugene Fodor, book of same name
37. “Do what you can with what you have where you are.”
– Squire Bill Widener
A lot of people think this is Theodore Roosevelt, but he’s actually quoting Squire Bill Widener in his book Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography
38. “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
39. “Anybody can be an explorer if they want to be. You can be an astronaut if you want. Figure out what you want to do, and then go do it.”
– Helen Thayer
She said this to Susan G. Hauser in an article called “Step by Step,” which appeared in Alaska Airlines, May 2008
40. “As a traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
– Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa
41. “Anything’s possible if you’ve got enough nerve.”
– JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
42. “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works! Avoiding danger is no safer in the longer run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. Faith alone defends. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”
– Helen Keller, The Open Door
43. “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to… find the place where all beauty came from.”
– C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
44. “Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.”
– Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
45. “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policies, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
46. “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. Wandering by lone sea-breakers, and sitting by desolate streams; — world-losers and world-forsakers, on whom the pale moon gleams: yet we are are the moves and shakers of the world for ever, it seems.”
– Arthur O’Shaughnessy, “Ode”
Fun fact: Usually the quote, “We are the dreamers of dreams,” is attributed to Roald Dahl because Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka. However, it comes from this longer poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy.
47. “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
He said this to Jason A. Mechey in the book, Building a Life of Value: Timeless Wisdom to Inspire and Empower Us.
48. “Travel sparks our imagination, feeds our curiosity, and reminds us how much we all have in common.”
– Deborah Lloyd, former Kate Spade creative director
I don’t have where she said this specifically, but the original pin I found it on was from Kate Spade.
49. “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, You Learn by Living
50. “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.”
– Sarah Frances Brown
Most people, myself included, always thought this was a classic Mark Twain quote, but it’s not! It’s from Sarah Frances Brown, who’s H. Jackson Brown Jr.’s mother. His book P.S. I Love You, where the quote appears, is about all her advice.
51. “I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it’s expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it’s perils.”
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
52. “Well, not just one wish. A whole hatful, Mary. I know what I’m gonna do tomorrow, and the next day, and the next year, and the year after that. I’m shakin’ the dust of this crummy little town off my feet, and I’m gonna see the world. Italy, Greece, the Parthenon, the Colosseum…”
53. “But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned… 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… Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
– Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
54. “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost…”
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
55. “How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.”
– Sarah Reijonen, Country Girl: Letting Love & Wanderlust Take the Reins
56. “I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes
57. “There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by… It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found…”
– John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
58.”We travel, some of us forever, to see other states, other lives, other souls.”
– Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol 7
59. “We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic to creativity. When we get home, home is still the same, but something in our minds has changed, and that changes everything.”
– Jonah Lehrer, “Why We Travel” via The Guardian
60. “It is good to have an end to a journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
61. “A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
– John A. Shedd, Salt from my Attic
This one is usually linked to Albert Einstein, but it’s John A. Shedd in his book, Salt from my Attic. I couldn’t find the book on Amazon, but it’s on Google Books, and Quote Investigator has a whole piece on it.
62. “Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
– Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
63. “KID, YOU’LL MOVE MOUNTAINS! So… be your name Buxbaum or Bixby or Bray or Mordecai Ali Van Allen O’Shea, you’re off to great places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So… get on your way!”
– Dr. Seuss, All the Places You’ll Go
64. “You belong among the wildflowers, you belong in a boat out at sea. Sail away, kill off the hours. You belong somewhere you feel free.”
– Tom Petty, “Wildflowers”
65. “Ideally, travel broadens our perspectives personally, culturally, and politically. Suddenly, the palette with which we paint the story of our lives has more colors.”
– Travel as a Political Act
66. “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: the Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
67. “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
68. “Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.”
– Roman Payne, The Wanderess
Basically this whole book seems pretty quotable.
69. “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
70. “It’s a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind… We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
– Carson McCullers, “Look Homeward, Americans,” Vogue, Dec 1940
71. “One can only really travel if one lets oneself go and takes what every place brings without trying to turn it into a healthy, private pattern of one’s own.”
– Freya Stark, cited in “A Marvelous Bright Eye” via Cornucopia 1992
72. “Gonna travel, gonna travel wild and free. I’m gonna pack my bags because this great big world is calling me.”
– Elvis Presley, “Harem Holiday”
73. “A curious word, wanderlust. I’m ready to go. I’ve already gone… Everywhere. I’ve been everywhere. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”
– Susan Sontag, “Unguided Tour” via The New Yorker (Oct 1977)
74. “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, Letter to Hester Thrale, 9/21/1773
75. “I’m not sure what I’ll do, but — well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Ice Palace”
76. “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.”
– Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential
77. “Homegrown alligator, see you later. Gotta hit the road, gotta hit the road. The sun it changed in the atmosphere, architecture unfamiliar, I can get used to this.”
– George Ezra, “Shotgun”
78. “I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.”
– Melody Truong
Ha! When I was looking up this quote, I thought it would just be a John Green quote from his book, Paper Towns. It’s not! And even Green didn’t realize til much later. However, he made a whole video about it, giving a shout to the original creator, Melody Truong, and arranging to give her proceeds from a poster he’d been selling with the quote both moving forward and retroactively.
79. “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, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography
80. “Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.”
Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
And there you have it! 80 travel quotes that you know will be accurate and inspiring. Any you think I’m missing? Let me know!
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