Top 100 Travel Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best travel quotes ever written, picked out of the full travel archive on QuoteForever. You will find Henry David Thoreau, Erma Bombeck, David Attenborough and Edmund Hillary among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort. - Jane Austen 1

There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.

We may run, walk, stumble, drive, or fly, but let us never lose sight ... - Gloria Gaither 2

We may run, walk, stumble, drive, or fly, but let us never lose sight of the reason for the journey or miss a chance to see a rainbow on the way.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think ... - John Steinbeck 3

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

4

There comes a moment on a journey when something sweet, something irresistible and charming as wine raised to thirsty lips, wells up in the traveller's being.

5

The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them.

6

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

7

I have never looked at foreign countries or gone there but with the purpose of getting to know the general human qualities that are spread all over the earth in very different forms, and then to find these qualities again in my own country and to recognize and to further them.

8

One of the best things about being [joyfully] retired is the freedom to travel when I want. When my son and daughter-in-law asked me to stay at their house for a week to house-sit while they were away on vacation, I had the freedom to do it.

9

I travel so much on stories, so I don't take vacation much, but one place I go back to again and again is my ranch.

10

When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen.

11

There's this group online that I frequent. It's a group of prop crazies just like me called the Replica Props Forum, and it's people who trade, make and travel in information about movie props.

12

I don't like dealing with money transactions in poor countries. I get confused between the feeling that I shouldn't haggle with poverty and getting ripped off

13

The unsuspected is the daily fare of the traveler in Thibet.

14

Let observation with extended observation observe extensively.

15

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

16

Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to one's own country. To have imagination is inevitably to be dissatisfied with where you live. There is in men, as Peter Quennell said, "a centrifugal tendency." In our wanderlust, we are lovers looking for consummation.

17

It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves - in finding themselves.

18

As you move through this life...you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you.

19

Adventure is worthwhile.

20

No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.

21

The Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar peaceful projects against discrimination in such major areas as employment and in the armed services.

22

I am not unconscious of the persuasive power exerted by these considerations to drag men along in the current; but I am not at liberty to travel that road.

23

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit.

24

Why are there no windows in the toilets on aeroplanes? To protect you from the most dedicated perverts on the planet, hanging off the wing to get a peep?

25

The bottom line is that time travel is allowed by the laws of physics.

26

Well now I'm no hero, that's understood. All the redemption I can offer girl, is beneath this dirty hood. With a chance to make it good somehow, hey what else can we do now? Except roll down the window, and let the wind blow back your hair. Well the night's busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere. We got one last chance to make it real.

27

It's important to travel and move and have a continual set of experiences so you've got more to feed back into your work. For me, it's a natural thing.

28

I love to not work. I like to travel. I work maybe half the year, no more.

29

Everywhere I travel throughout Eastern Washington, I hear from people demanding we do a better job of controlling our borders and reducing illegal immigration.

30

Never travel by sea when you can go by land.

31

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, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.

32

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

33

Let me be a free man - free to travel, free to stop, free to work.

34

No place is ever as bad as they tell you it's going to be.

35

At the moment I'm doing this space movie, so I'm obsessed with physics and space travel. I know three months down the line it's gone. Then I'll be able to superficially say stuff about space.

36

People in the CIA, they marry each other. They're like actors! We have to travel without much warning to far-flung places, and it's very hard to communicate what our experiences are like to those in the outside world.

37

the only time travelers are really gay is when they are traveling for no good reason at all.

38

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

39

But when I really look back on my life, being really honest about it and now that I've got the chance to travel the world, seeing how a lot of little kids grow up - my life wasn't so bad.

40

When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego ... things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.

41

Being in Blur has allowed me to travel and hear the music that's being made all over the world.

42

Local economies are suffering as people spend more on fuel and less on consumer goods and travel.

43

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.'

44

I think a major element of jetlag is psychological. Nobody ever tells me what time it is at home.

45

I'm absolutely strict about it. When I land, I put my watch right, and I don't care what I feel like, I will go to bed at half past eleven. If that means going to bed early or late, that's what I live by. As soon as you get there, live by that time.

46

For here, am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do... Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still - and I think my spaceship knows which way to go. Tell my wife I love her very much.

47

We're on a road to nowhere, come on inside. Takin' that ride to nowhere, we'll take that ride. I'm feelin' okay this mornin', and you know, we're on the road to paradise, here we go, here we go.

48

I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.

49

Antigravity, teleportation, time travel, energetic DNA evolution and consciousness transformation could create a world few of us ever even dreamed of.

50

My fear of flying starts as soon as I buckle myself in and then the guy up front mumbles a few unintelligible words then before I know it I'm thrust into the back of my seat by acceleration that seems way too fast and the rest of the trip is an endless nightmare of turbulence, of near misses. And then the cabbie drops me off at the airport.

51

If you like trekking, go to the Himalayas or Peru. I love those kinds of trips. But it all depends on your own life and what you like and what you expect.

52

I'll bring my grits when I travel, because I get so hungry on the road.

53

Everybody has to leave, everybody has to leave their home and come back so they can love it again for all new reasons.

54

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.

55

I have discovered that even the mediocre can have adventures and even the fearful can achieve.

56

It's not a real adventure when you have to pay for it.

57

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope.

58

India - a land where the last thing one needs to bother with is looking good. In India - at least in the circles I moved in - it's natural to look beautiful by the smile in your heart and the way you move through the world.

59

When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.

60

Once you see the drivers in Indonesia you understand why religion plays such a part in their lives.

61

I have paid as much as $300 a night to throw up into a sink shaped like a seashell.

62

The ignorance of French society gives one a rough sense of the infinite.

63

I associate going to an airport with work because I travel so much with my job. So when I have a few days free from work, I tend to stay at home.

64

Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.

65

Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit.

66

Every man ought to be inquisitive through every hour of his great adventure down to the day when he shall no longer cast a shadow in the sun. For if he dies without a question in his heart, what excuse is there for his continuance?

67

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.

68

A cruise ship is a floating town of lazy people.

69

As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.

70

The ideal is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere.

71

The time to enjoy a European trip is about three weeks after unpacking.

72

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. . . . It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

73

If black boxes survive air crashes - why don't they make the whole plane out of that stuff?

74

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

75

He who walks in the middle of the road gets hit from both sides.

76

The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.

77

The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it.

78

It's not the destination, It's the glory of the ride.

79

Let me in, immigration man, can I cross the line and pray, I can stay another day? Won't you let me in, immigration man? I won't toe your line today, I can't see it anyway.

80

I hate London when it's not raining.

81

I get pretty much all the exercise I need walking down airport concourses carrying bags.

82

People are always asking me what the world will be like economically in the year 2000. I do know this: in the year 2000, no matter what else happens, there will still be good food in France.

83

I am blessed for what I have, but I believed in it from the beginning. Today, the dream is the same: I still want to travel, I still want to entertain, and I most certainly still want to have fun.

84

I think it's important to travel around in order to get a notion of what's going on, to find out what people are think about. I enjoy talking on campuses most because people are more informed and discussion is generally livelier.

85

Sex in a woman's world has the same currency a penny has in a man's. Every penny saved is a penny earned in one world and in the next every sexual adventure is a literary experience.

86

When traveling with someone, take large does of patience and tolerance with your morning coffee.

87

It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.

88

for many people traveling can have deep psychological meaning.

89

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

90

I have climbed several higher mountains without guide or path, and have found, as might be expected, that it takes only more time and patience commonly than to travel the smoothest highway.

91

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

92

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.

93

A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.

94

Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.

95

Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.

96

So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what's the hurry?

97

It takes a man of genius to travel in his own country, in his native village; to make any progress between his door and his gate.

98

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

99

He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly.

100

I suspect that, if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going farther, as if just starting for home at sundown, and having a last word before he drove off.

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