Travel quotes are so inspiring, I could read long lists of them all day…and I have! But I don’t just like to read about them, when I find one that really speaks to me, I want to make it my own and keep it so it inspires me daily, especially when I’m on a trip. That’s why I love finding and adding travel quotes to my travel journal.
When I’ve looked online for travel quotes, there are hundreds to be found, but nowhere did I find specific articles about travel quotes for travel journalers and ideas on how to incorporate them into a travelogue. Wll, since I couldn’t find it, I made it. In this article you’ll find 20 of the most inspiring travel quotes I’ve found and X ways to incorporate them into your journal. I even included examples from my own journals to inspire you and give you ideas of how you can incorporate travel quotes into your journal.
Funny Travel Quotes
“Jet lag is for amateurs.” – Dick Clark
“Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.” ― Roseanne Barr
“Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin
“A journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it” – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
*Travel Journal Idea: Make it the Cover*
Have you found one quote that is so good that it inspires a whole trip? Make it the cover. This is a great way to decorate or embellish your travelogue. It can be fancy, with lettering, or simple, in your own hand. I love using this idea because every time I pick up my journal, I reread the quote and it infuses meaning and beauty into the trip every day.
“Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.” – Kurt Vonnegut
“A hotel room all to myself is my idea of a good time.”
― Chelsea Handler, My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands
“Don’t worry about the world ending today, it’s already tomorrow in Australia.” — Charles M. Schulz
“My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.” ― Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty
“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Unknown
“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
“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish… You see, it is difficult to get all which I want. And then when I do not succeed I get mad with anger.” ― Simone de Beauvoir
“If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” – Yogi Berra
Travel Quotes for Writing Prompts
“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” ― Paul Theroux
Do you agree, disagree? Write about it.
“The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.” ― Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
What mindset do you want to have on this trip? Write about it in your travel journal.
*Travel Journal Idea: Use it as a Writing Prompt*
Travel quotes are great to use as writing prompts to get you writing when you’re stuck. I find my favorite quotes so inspiring that they can often bring me out of a writing rut and help me see the trip in a new way.
“We can’t jump off bridges anymore because our iPhones will get ruined. We can’t take skinny dips in the ocean because there’s no service on the beach and adventures aren’t real unless they’re on Instagram. Technology has doomed the spontaneity of adventure and we’re helping destroy it every time we Google, check-in, and hashtag.” ― Jeremy Glass
Do you agree or disagree with this quote? How do you want your relationship with technology to be on your trip? How can you invite more spontaneity and less technological connection for the duration of your trip?
“The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you’ve barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.” ― Naomi Shihab Nye
Which parts of yourself are you fascinated to meet on this trip? What are you curious about within yourself and how can this trip bring that side of you out and meet those ‘few glistening beams?’
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” – Anthony Bourdain
What do you want to take from this trip? What good thing do you want to leave behind?
Short Travel Quotes
“Not all those who wander are lost.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” ― St. Augustine
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ― Lao Tzu
“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” ― Anita Desai
“Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” ― Anthony Bourdain
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” ― Marcel Proust
“Travel brings power and love back into your life.” ― Rumi
*Travel Journal Idea: Illustrate it with its Own Spread*
When I find a short, beautiful quote I like to illustrate it on its own page at the beginning of my travel journal. Here you can experiment with lettering and illustration to make your travel journal unique to you and your trip. I always love the end result. Use one of these short quotes to try it in your journal.
“Live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry” — Jack Kerouac
“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” ― G.K. Chesterton
“I read; I travel; I become” ― Derek Walcott
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” – Ibn Battuta
“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill
“To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark
Inspiring Travel Quotes
“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
― Wendell Berry, A Place on Earth
“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
“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
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
“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody.” —Anthony Bourdain
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..” ― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road
“If you’re brave enough to leave behind everything familiar and comforting, which can be anything from your house to bitter, old, resentments and out on a truth-seeking journey, either externally or internally, and if you accept everyone you meet along the way as a teacher and if you are prepared, most of all, to face and forgive some very difficult realities about yourself, then the truth will not be withheld from you.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
*Travel Journal Idea: Use Your Favorite Travel Quotes to Inspire Your Trip*
This is great to do before your trip to set the tone and intentions you want to have while traveling. Find 5 travel quotes that speak to you and feel inspiring to you and the trip you’re about to go on. Once you find them, write them in the front of your journal. Then, while you’re on your trip, go back to them often. Remember how these quotes make you feel and when things get hard, or frustrating or dull, use the quotes to center yourself back into relaxation and inspiration. With the quotes as a companion on your trip, they will help you bring depth and meaning to your trip, plus those quotes will forever be tied to that particular adventure.
“Most travelers hurry too much… the great thing is to stray and travel with eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly– but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling…. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still a needle, you’ll be there.” —Lawrence Durrell
“Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what’s right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in.” —Andrew Zimmern
“When it is over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life, something particular and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” —Mary Oliver
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
“Let’s not travel to tick things off lists or collect half-hearted, semi-treasures to be places in dusty drawers in empty rooms. Rather, we’ll travel to find grounds and rooftops and tiny hidden parks, where we’ll sit and dismiss the passing time, spun in the city’s web ’til we’ve surrendered, content to be spent and consumed. I need to feel a place while I’m in it.”
— Victoria Erickson
“(Travel is) humbling to the point where you have major regrets about some of the stupid things you said, some of the things you thought were right. You keep going to these countries, and it’s like you forgot the lesson from the last time. But the first person you encounter kind-of bitch-slaps you upside the head in the most wonderful innocent way, and you realize, God, I’m still an asshole. And this guy, by doing nothing except being broke and so incredibly polite – it takes you aback, you realize, I’m still not there yet. I still have, like, eight miles to go before I can even get into the parking lot of humility. I have to keep going back. It’s like going back to the chiropractor to get a readjustment. That’s me in Africa; that’s me in SE Asia. You come back humbled and you bring that into your life.” —Henry Rollins
“Paradise was always over there, a day’s sail away. But it’s a funny thing, escapism. You can go far and wide and you can keep moving on and on through places and years, but you never escape your own life. I, finally, knew where my life belonged. Home.” ― J. Maarten Troost, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu
“The struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.” ― Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip
“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
*Travel Journal Idea: Inspiring Index Cards*
This is great for individuals, couples and families. Before your trip, go online or to your favorite travel books and find 5-10 travel quotes you love. Grab some index cards or decorative paper and write a quote on each piece of paper. Put them in an envelope in the front or back of your journal. Then, each day of your trip or whenever you feel moved, choose a quote randomly out of the envelope. Once you have it, read it over (since you picked them out, each one will be inspiring) and use it as a prompt for the day. Use it as a writing prompt or the beginning of a collage spread or just paste it in that day’s entry and call it done. Get creative with it! The point is to infuse the trip with these inspiring quotes and let each one become a part of your journal and your trip. It will bring so much beauty and meaning to your journal.
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” ― Jack Kerouac
But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. 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. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here nor There: Travels in Europe
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that 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
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” ― Pico Iyer
“Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.” ― Anthony Bourdain, Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
“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
That we leave our homes, that we step through our doors to the world, that we travel our whole lives not because we want to collect exotic T-shirts, not because we want to consume foreign adventure the same Western way we consume plastic and Styrofoam and LCD TVs and iPads, but because it has the power to renew us—not the guarantee, not the promise, just the possibility. Because there are places our imaginations can never construct for us, and there are people who we will never meet but we could and we might. It reminds us that there is always reason to begin again.”
― Stephen Markley, Tales of Iceland or “Running with the Huldufolk in the Permanent Daylight
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
What is it about the American obsession with productivity and responsibility that makes it so difficult for us to allow ourselves a little time to solve the puzzle of our own lives, before it’s too late?” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
“A new kind of heat, brutal and hard, carrying the smell of another continent. As I came down the mountain this heat piled up, pushing against me with blasts of sand, so that I walked half-blind, my tongue dry as a carob bean, obsessed once again by thirst. These were ominous days of nerve-bending sirocco, with peasants wrapped up to the eyes… but far down in the valley, running in slow green coils, I could see at last the tree-lined Guadalquivir.” – Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
“Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.” ― Roman Payne, Cities & Countries
“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.” ― Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
“Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I’d forgotten England even existed.” – Alex Garland, The Beach
“The traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming in quantity rather than quality, and comes away with his soul and imagination unchanged, untouched by the wonder of a life lived differently.” ―Roxanne Reid, A Walk in the Park: Travels in and Around South Africa’s National Parks
“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
“Own only what you can always carry with you: known languages, known countries, known people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
Travel quotes are so fun and inspiring when added to your travel journal. I hoe you found a few quotes and ideas for your next journal. Comment and share below or add your favorite quote that’s not on the list. Happy Travels!