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The 50 Best Travel Quotes To Fuel Your Wanderlust (With Original Images)

9 min readUpdated September 21, 2026Nomads RTW

Empty road running into a mountain valley at sunrise

The power of the words with a compelling image can really impulse your wanderlust motivation. To give you some inspiration, we have collected the top 50 inspirational travel quotes. In addition, we have included them in some beautiful images, making it easy to share on your Pinterest or Facebook!

All the pictures and images of this post have been taken and created by us.

We also went back over the attributions. Four of the quotes below are routinely credited to the wrong person — Mark Twain, Saint Augustine, Chief Seattle and Ralph Waldo Emerson never wrote the lines that travel under their names — so they now carry the author the evidence actually points to, with the source next to them.

Wanderlust Travel Quotes

If you came here for the restless ones — the quotes that make you open a map rather than nod at a nice thought — these are the wanderlust travel quotes in the list: 14. Travel far enough, you meet yourself, 31. A ship in harbor is safe, 32. Life is short and the world is wide, 38. A good traveler has no fixed plans, 47. Once the travel bug bites and 48. The gladdest moment in human life.

The other forty-four are below, grouped the way we use them: the ten we come back to most, then the short ones, then the motivational ones.

The Top 10 Inspiring Travel Quotes

1. “Home is the here and now.” – Buddhism.

home is the here and now

This might be our favourite of all the travel quotes and is the one we use on our homepage. Once we left for our trip around the world for a whole year, after a few months this is really how we felt. It wouldn’t matter where we where it would feel like home to us.

2. “Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.” – Gaby Basora.

3. “We travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us.” – Anonymous.

4. “Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.” – Oscar Wilde.

5. “The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.” – Oprah Winfrey.

6. “If you’re not living on the edge, you’re taking up too much space.” – Unknown.

7.“A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.” –Franklin D. Roosevelt.

8. “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” – Stephen Covey.

Personally, when I read this one all I want to do is leave all behind and leave! such a short travel quote yet so powerful!

9. “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.

10. “Take every chance you get in life because some things only happen once.” – Karen Gibbs.

This is one of the most encouraging travel quotes! We only have one life and one chance to make the most of it. Let’s forget any excuses and find our next destination ;)

Short Travel Quotes

11. “Wherever you go, go with all your heart!” – Confucius.

When we travel to a destination, is because we really feel we want to go there and explore. That’s is why we find this travel quote really inspiring and we feel totally identified with it.

12. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” – Anita Desai.

This is so true. Who do not remember those cool things you did on a destination or any amazing sights from now and then? Eventually, each of the places you visit truly become a part of you.

13. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill.

14. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” -David Mitchell.

15. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” – Neale Donald Walsch.

16. “Take only memories, leave only footprints.” – Anonymous.

Nearly every list hands this one to Chief Seattle, who died in 1866. It is a twentieth-century conservation slogan: the earliest version found so far is a 1954 sign at Bandelier National Monument — “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints” — and the “memories” wording turns up in 1962. Nobody knows who wrote it (Quote Investigator).

17. “Everything you do is based on the choices you make.” – Wayne Dyer.

We talked to many people who are not really happy with what they do. But remember, you always have the last decision and only you own your life.

18.“Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman.

19. “I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.” – Caskie Stinnett.

20. “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.” – Suzanne Collins.

21. “Life is a journey. Make the best of it.” – Unknown.

22. “The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” – Anna Quindlen.

23. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca.

24. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” – Helen Keller.

25. “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta.

When you are traveling, you learn and see a lot. Once you process it all in your head, the best way of keeping your memories alive is by telling them.

26. “Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.” – Chinese Proverb.

27. “Not until we are lost do we begin to find ourselves.” – Henry David Thoreau

28. “A year from now, you will wish you had started today.” – Karen Lamb.

29. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller.

This might be the most intelligent travel quote of all times. It takes some trial and error to realize how true this is! But fear no more, cause we have now made an incredibly useful post about minimalist travel tips for packing light.

30. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber.

31. “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.” – John A. Shedd.

We had this one slightly wrong for years, and so does half the internet. The line is on page 20 of Salt from My Attic, John A. Shedd, 1928 — one of the few quotes in this list with a clean, checkable source.

32. “Life is short and the world is wide, the sooner you start exploring it, the better.” – Simon Raven.

With a total of 195 countries in the world, the sooner we start exploring then the better!

33. “I will not follow where the path may lead, but I will go where there is no path, and I will leave a trail.” – Muriel Strode.

Almost always credited to Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it is not his. It opens “Wind-Wafted Wild Flowers”, a poem Muriel Strode published in The Open Court in August 1903, twenty-one years after Emerson died (Quote Investigator).

We really are the kind of people who like to create new paths rather than follow existing ones, so we feel totally identified with this one — we just stopped putting Emerson’s name on it.

34. “Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” – Dolly Parton.

35. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller.

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Motivational Travel Quotes

36.“Sometimes the bad things that happen in our lives put us directly on the path to the best things that will ever happen to us.” – Nicole Reed.

37. “Somewhere on your journey don’t forget to turn around and enjoy the view.” – Unknown.

When we go to express trips, we sometimes forget about this because we are so focused on where to go next. We need to remember that every place we visit worth those extra minutes to look back and enjoy the views.

38. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu.

39. “Stuff your eyes with wonder,’ he said, ‘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.” – Ray Bradbury.

40. “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 harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Sarah Frances Brown.

This is the most famous travel quote Mark Twain never wrote. It first appears in print in 1990, in H. Jackson Brown Jr.’s P.S. I Love You, a collection of the sayings of his mother, Sarah Frances Brown; nothing before that links it to Twain (Quote Investigator).

It is a long one, and it still does the job: it urges you to act before it is too late. Because who wants to wait until it is, right?

41. “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” – Unknown.

Everybody gives this one to Saint Augustine and nobody has ever found it in anything he wrote. The closest documented ancestor is French: Fougeret de Monbron’s Le Cosmopolite (1753), where the universe is a book of which you have read only the first page if you have seen only your own country.

Either way, we can say that with every trip we become a bit wiser. You get to know a country’s history, how people live, the religion, the food. It is indeed the book of life.

42. “To those who stay put, the world is but an imaginary place. But to the movers, the makers, and the shakers, the world is all around, an endless invitation.” – Unknown.

43. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust.

Because we love photography, we now pay attention to detail more than ever. And sometimes, most of the interesting things are not just gorgeous landscapes but curious and unique details which you can only find in certain destinations.

44. “Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.” – Irving Wallace.

It is not that hard to do something extraordinary out of the ordinary. And you do not really need to travel to that. Simply start by doing something that maybe you have not done before. Like trying a new food or another sport!

45. “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments and places that take our breath away.” – Unknown.

46. “Nothing lasts forever, except the day before you start your vacation.” – Gayland Anderson.

You know how true this is. That day before the vacations always seems like a 28 hours day!

47. “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.

48. “The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” -Sir Richard Burton.

49. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller.

50. “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” – Albert Einstein.

Conclusion- What Do You Think About These Travel Quotes?

That was quite a dose of inspiring travel quotes we have put into images. If you still feel like reading some more, you can always keep checking in Goodreads.

After that, I am guessing you will be willing to find your next destination!

And if you have one already, you can always use our trip planning toolkit, where we have gathered the travel resources we actually use to plan a trip faster and cheaper.

Finally, let us know in the comments below if there is any other quote you know and should be on this list!

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