Travel Quotes

‘There’s no place like home… There’s no place like home ‘, and while I don’t have to keep repeating it like Dorothy did in the Wizard of Oz.. I know that the lines are true…nonetheless here are some travel quotes that I’ve found interesting, some even ring true…. …

"Travel is the realm of the improbable adventure, the quick fix, the ship passing in the night. It entitles you to meet interesting people, whom you would never meet, even if you laid traps or advertised for them. Not only do you meet them, but also unmeet them, all in the space of, it often seems, a mere compacted evening. As there is so little time, bodies in motion drop their guard and immediatly get on with their stories. Then the proverbial ships part, each to its destination, never again to brush each other's wake."
- Lawrence Millman, "Last Places”

". . . I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart."
- Colette

"Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating."
- Michael Crichton


"Internal burning . . . wandering fever . . ."
- Kalevala

"If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."
- Henry Miller


"Eat dessert first
Life is uncertain"
- Anonymous

". . .life is short and the world is wide"
- Simon Raven

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. . . In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable."
- John Steinbeck

"Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'"
- Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world."
- Freya Stark


"Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent."
- Margot Fonteyn

"A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."
- George Moore 1852-1933: the Brook Kerith

"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

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost"
- J. R. R. Tolkien "Lord of the Rings"


"All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. "
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
- Paul Theroux



"Muhammad says, 'Love of one's country is a part of the faith.'
But don't take that literally! Your real 'country' is where you're heading, not where you are.
Don't misread that hadith."
- Rumi

"Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."
- The late modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe, in an introduction to her work displayed on a newly opened museum dedicated to her art in New Mexico.

"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

"Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!"
- Bob Dylan

"Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns."
- Paul Fussel

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears."
- Glenn Clark

". . .If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another."
- Paul Bowles

"A study of the Great Malady; horror of home."
- Baudelair, Journaux Intimes

"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe."
- Anatole France

"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

". . .the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home."
- Paul Theroux

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
- Aldous Huxley


". . .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

"I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine."
- Caskie Stinnett

"Better far off to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become a part of life and life's recollections."
- Augustus Hare

"We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment."
- Hilaire Belloc

"When you are everywhere, you are nowhere.
When you are somewhere, you are everywhere."
- Rumi

"Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name."
- Alice Meynell

"Old men and far travelers may lie with authority."
- Anonymous

"That same preface also contains a single line that really does sum everything up: 'Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.'"
- Jeff Greenwald - Big World dispatch #20


"He gave the impression that very many cities had rubbed him smooth."
- Graham Greene

"A good traveler has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving."
- Lao Tzu

"Trust in Allah, but tie your camel."
- Old Muslim Proverb

"A good holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours."
- J. B. Priestley

"There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be travelling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love."
- Cyril Connolly

"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, Blue Highways
"The journey not the arrival matters."
- T.S. Eliot

"Travelling 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

"The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped."
- Graham Greene

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination."
- Roy M. Goodman

"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

"Every exit is an entry somewhere else."
- Tom Stoppard

"The fastest way to travel is to be there already."
- Terry Pratchett

"It is not down in any map; true places never are."
- Herman Melville

"The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think."
- Lawrence Durrell

"Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh

". . .Destination is merely a byproduct of the journey."
- Eric Hansen

"Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen."
- Louis L'Amour

"What am I doing here?"
- Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
- Martin Buber

"It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places."
- Paul Theroux

"One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy."
- Sir Richard Burton

". . .I have learned that the cost of everything from a royal suite to a bottle of soda water can be halved by the simple expedient of saying it must be halved."
- Robert Byron, on bargaining in the Middle East, The Road to Oxiana, 1933

"People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home."
- Dagobert D. Runes, US writer

"We are a plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them!"
- Bilbo to Gandalf on their first meeting

"Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?"
- Peter Matthiessen

"It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be."
- Selma Lagerlof

"It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home."
- Rumi

"If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil."
- Sinclair Lewis on the toil of travel

"An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys."
- Iain Sinclair

"The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet."
- J.R.R Tolkien

"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

"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
- Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

"One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind."
- Charles Dickens


"Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong."
- Vita Sackville-West

". . .the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited."
- Evelyn Waugh, on the properties of a good travel writer (speaking of Eric Newby)

"We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself."
- Samuel Johnson, on packing for travel

"These spiritual windowshoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.
What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.
Where did you go? 'Nowhere.'
What did you have to eat? 'Nothing much.'
Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.
Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah.
It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you."
- Rumi

"A year to go around the world! A whole twelve months of scenes and curious happenings in far-off foreign lands! You have thought of doing this, almost promised yourself that when you got old enough, and rich enough, and could "spare the time," you too would go around the world. Most of us get old enough; some of us get rich enough; but the time! the time! - to spare the time, to cut loose from goods and lands, from stocks and dreary desks, quit clients, patients, readers, home and friends - ay, and our enemies whom we so dearly love! Full many a promise must be broken and few the voyagers round the world."
- D.N. Richardson, "A Girdle Round the Earth", 1888

"In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as [brazilwood and pepper, which] added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity. . .[From] these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales."
- Claude Levi-Strauss on the motivation of travel


"Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible purpose of a stranglevine vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments, dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and video cassettes, parking meters, paydays and phone calls.
You can watch it from Asia. You read the newspapers, you think about your friends back home - marching along in the parade of events - and you know it's still happening. It's happening there. On the other side. Yesterdays, todays and tomorrows are tumbling after each other like Sambo and the tiger, blending into an opaque and viscous ooze. There is no such thing as now; only a continual succession of laters, whipping their tendrils around the calendar. The clutches of the vine. . .
In Nepal, the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat breakfast, read the paper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown to change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and arrive home in time for lunch."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"

"[The traveler] may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates. In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humored patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. . . Traveling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance."
- Charles Darwin

"Certainly, 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

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
- Jack Kerouac

"The autumn leaves are falling like rain,
Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
And you, you are a thousand miles away,
There are always two cups at my table"
- T'ang Dynasty

"Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation."
- Elizabeth Drew

"Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The map is not the territory."
- Alfred Korzybski

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
- Paul Theroux

"If you come to a fork in the road, take it."
- Yogi Berra

"It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."
- Douglas Adams, "Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul"

"He won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won't fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation."
- Spalding Gray

". . . people don't take trips--trips take people."
- John Steinbeck

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."
- Susan Sontag


"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance."
- Anonymous

"Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage."
- Regina Nadelson

"I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience -- and laughter."
- Susan M. Watkins


"There is no such thing as 'the Queen's English'. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!"
- Mark Twain, on English

"Travel - to go, move or journey from one place to another."
- Anonymous



By the time we are, in our superior wisdom, decided to make a start, we discover that those who have gone fearlessly on before, have, in their blundering way, traveled a considerable distance. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don't know now, and that you will not know next year, if you wait. The William Feather Magazine.

A traveller without observation is a bird without wings. Moslih Eddin Saadi (1184-1291)

A wise traveler never despises his own country. Carlo Goldoni.

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.


Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.
* Bertrand Russell



"It's a battered old suitcase and a hotel someplace and a wound that will never heal."
(Tom Waits)

"No one speaks English and everything is broken."
(Tom Waits)

"I love to travel, But hate to arrive."
(Albert Einstein)



"Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled."
(Mohammed)


"Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones."
(Anne Sophie Swetchine)


"If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel."
(Will Kommen)


"It is solved by walking."
((Algerian Proverb))

"Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God."
(Kurt Vonnegut)



How beautiful it is to do nothing and then rest afterwards. Spanish Proverb
The further one goes the less one knows- Lao-tzu (sixth century BC)

I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts. Heman Melville

It's a death trap it's a suicide rap We gotta get out while we're young `Cause tramps like us baby we were born to run -Bruce Springsteen



Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore Andre Gide

The people here are bound to think this is the best place, or they wouldn't be here, would they? William Sutcliffe

A ship in harbor is safe -- but that is not what ships are for." --John A. Shedd

Let your heart guide you. It whispers so listen closely. -- The Land Before Time

A guest never forgets the host who had treated him kindly. Homer

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time -Stephen Wright

Heroes take journeys confront dragons and discover the treasure of their true selves -Carol Pearson

I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth. Steve McQueen

If an ass goes travelling he will not come home a horse Thomas Fuller

It was kind of solemn drifting down the big still river laying on our backs looking up at stars and we didn't even feel like talking aloud Mark Twain

Love has given me wings so I must fly. -- A Knight's Tale

NOT I NOT ANYONE else can travel that road for you You must travel it for yourself. Walt Whitman

O public road I say back I am not afraid to leave you yet I love you you express me better than I can express myself Walt Whitman

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

Simplicity is making the journey of this life with just baggage enough. Charles Dudley Warner

The only journey is the one within. Rainer Maria Rilke

The universe is a big place perhaps the biggest. Kurt Vonnegut

Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel's immediate rewards the inevitable myriad new sights smells and sounds but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way -Ralph Crawshaw


We don't go anywhere. Going somewhere is for squares. We just go! -Marlon Brando The Wild One (1954)

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time T. S. Elliot
What we do in life echoes in eternity. -- Gladiator


Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.
- John Burroughs

To roam giddily, and be everywhere but at home, such freedom doth a banishment become.
- Dr. John Donne



Traveling makes men wiser, but less happy.
- Thomas Jefferson


We've traveled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
- Tom Stoppard