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Whether you’re deep in wanderlust or planning your next trip, there’s nothing like an inspirational adventure quote to boost your excitement for destinations unknown.
Like a lot of things in this day and age, popular travel quotes become cliché pretty fast as they cross the vast internet terrain. While there’s nothing wrong with loving a good quote, sometimes all that exposure means what was once a profound statement loses its meaning.
In an attempt to pull together fresh inspiration, this list of adventure quotes mixes beloved favorites with more unconventional travel quotes. In fact, often the best travel quotes aren’t about taking a trip specifically, but rather the spirit travel—curiosity, creativity, connection, growth and self-awareness. Use them for your travel journal, vision board or next Instagram caption.
The best adventure quotes to inspire your journeys
1. “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
2. “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” — Mary Anne Radmacher
3. “Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn’t mean to take.” — Angela N. Blount
4. “Great growth comes from loneliness. You have time to develop, dwell in your own mind and go a bit mad. All great people are a bit mad. That’s good to remember. Don’t escape it.” ― Charlotte Eriksson
5. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow” — Anita Desai
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6. “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” — Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
7. “Traveling—it gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.” — Ibn Battuta
8. “Life is a concept, like the ‘universe’, that expands as soon as we reach what we think is its edge.” ― Kamand Kojouri
9. “So much of who we are, is where we have been.” — William Langwiesche
10. “Adventure is worthwhile in itself” — Amelia Earhart
11. “The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home—and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.” — Rolf Potts
12. “Expectation is the dirtiest word in a traveler’s vocabulary.” ― John Early
13. “The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” — Anna Quindlen
14. “Live your life by a compass not a clock.” — Stephen Covey
15. “People don’t take trips, trips take people.” — John Steinbeck
16. “Travel doesn’t become adventure until you leave yourself behind” — Marty Rubin
17. “Curiosity will conquer fear more than bravery will.” — James Stephenson
18. “Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told, ‘I am with you, kid. Let’s go.’” — Maya Angelou
19. “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” — Carl Sagan
20. “All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” — James Thurber
21. “It is always with excitement that I wake up in the morning wondering what my intuition will toss up to me, like gifts from the sea. Intuition tells the thinking mind where to look next.” — Jonas Salk
22. “It may be that our cosmic curiosity…is a genetically-encoded force that we illuminate when we look up and wonder.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson
23. “Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.” — Paulo Coelho
24. “I’ve always been blessed, or cursed, some might say, with an insatiable curiosity, a desire to find something out about a people and a place. That’s where it all begins.” — Michael Palin
25. “The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.” ―Yasutani Roshi
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26. “Life is not what happened to you but what you remember and how you remember it to retell it.” — Gabriel García Márquez
27. “Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.” — Alain de Botton
28. “In today’s rush, we all think too much — seek too much — want too much — and forget about the joy of just being.” — Eckhart Tolle
29. “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” — William Butler Yeats
30. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” ―Søren Kierkegaard
31. “We are a landscape of all we have seen.” — Isamu Noguchi
32. “Travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living.” — Unknown
33. “A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” — Moslih Eddin Saadi
34. “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes. 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
35. “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
36. “Travel, in its essence, is to feel like a child again. Discovering new sights, smells and sounds as if we’re the first time.” — Rolf Potts
37. “Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.” — St. Augustine
38. “Don’t forget—no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.” — Charles de Lint
39. “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places.” — Alain de Botton
40. “Travel not to find yourself, but to remember who you’ve been all along.” — Unknown
41. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
42. “Don’t think about why you question, simply don’t stop questioning. Don’t worry about what you can’t answer, and don’t try to explain what you can’t know. Curiosity is its own reason.” — Albert Einstein
43. “The days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles.” — Hebrew Sabbath Prayer
44. “A person susceptible to wanderlust is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” — Pico Iyer
45. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes
46. “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes—including you.” — Anne Lamott
47. “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
48. “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
49. “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” — Roald Dahl
50. “Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.” — Ben Okri
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51.“Travel does not exist without home…If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost. Home is a reflecting surface, a place to measure our growth and enrich us after being infused with the outside world.” ― Josh Gates
52. “It is good to feel lost… because it proves you have a navigational sense of where ‘Home’ is. You know that a place that feels like being found exists. And maybe your current location isn’t that place but, Hallelujah, that unsettled, uneasy feeling of lost-ness just brought you closer to it.” — Erika Harris
53. “Quite some years ago, I started traveling the planet. I thought this would teach me something about the world we live in. I was wrong… It taught me something about myself. It changed me. And nothing will ever be black-and-white again.” ― Maarten Schafer
54. “Who might I be if I am away from the things that I currently use to define myself?” ― Eileen Cook
55. “The more you look, the more you see.” ― Robert M. Pirsig
56. “There was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” —— Jack Kerouac
57. “Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us.” ― Andrew Forsthoefe
58. “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.” — Julia Cameron
59. “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.” — Alan Alda
60. “Travel, at its best, transforms us in ways that aren’t always apparent until we’re back home.” — Eric Weiner
61. “Do not stop thinking of life as an adventure. You have no security unless you can live bravely, excitingly, imaginatively, unless you can choose a challenge instead of a competence.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
62. “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
63. “May I see what I do. May I do it differently. May I make this a way of life.” — Buddhist mantra
64. “People forget years and remember moments.” — Ann Beattie
65. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” — Anaïs Nin
66. “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.” — Jawaharial Nehru
67. “Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.” — Eudora Welty
68. “Travel is not really about leaving our homes, but leaving our habits.” — Pico Iyer
69. “To travel is to take a journey into yourself.” — Danny Kaye
70. “Adventure can be an end in itself. Self-discovery is the secret ingredient.” — Grace Lichtenstein
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71. “Life is a magical journey, so travel endlessly to unfold its profound and heart touching beauty.” — Debasish Mridha
72. “You must go on adventures to find out where you belong.” — Sue Fitzmaurice
73. “Travel is about the gorgeous feeling of teetering in the unknown.” — Anthony Bourdain
74. “I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
75. “Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.” — Peter Hoeg
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