People the world over draw their inspiration from many different sources. I know from talking to a variety travellers there are many things that inspired them to travel. A picture, a video or a friend but one of the most powerful tools is the written word.
If you are sitting at your desk at work or procrastinating on the internet at home, read these. Feel inspired and get up and do something about it. I’m living my dream. What is really stopping you from living yours?
Any quotes I missed? Post your favourites in the comment section!
1. “All that is gold does not glitter not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
2. “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
3. “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
4. “A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
5. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust
6. “The saying ‘Getting there is half the fun’ became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.” – Henry J. Tillman
7. “Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
8. “Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” – The Dhammapada
9. “A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.” – George Moore
10. “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
11. “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
12. “He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
13. “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” – Saint Augustine
14. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
15. “Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves” – Euripides
16. “The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G. K. Chesterton
17. “I should like to spend the whole of my in life travelling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.” – William Hazlitt.
18. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travellers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux
19. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost
20. “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
21. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled.” The Prophet Mohammed
22. “I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” – Rosalia de Castro
23. “The travel writer seeks the world we have lost – the lost valleys of the imagination.” – Alexander Cockburn
24. “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
25. “You lose sight of things… and when you travel, everything balances out.” – Daranna Gidel
26. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber
27. “Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” – Susan Sontag
28. “If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness, and fears.” – Glenn Clark
29. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.” – Hilaire Belloc
30. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” – Oscar Wilde
31. “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
32. “The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.” – Russell Baker
33. “A man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not; but a man of superior talent (which I cannot deny myself to be without being impious) will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place.” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
34. “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.” – Ernest Hemingway
35. “Make voyages! Attempt them… there’s nothing else.” – Tennessee Williams
36. “Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli
37. “To get to know a country, you must have direct contact with the earth. It’s futile to gaze at the world through a car window.” – Albert Einstein
38. “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
39. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” Lillian Smith
40. “The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it.” – Lord Chesterfield
41. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T. S. Eliot
42. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
43. “Journeys end in lovers meeting.” – William Shakespeare
44. “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.” – Daniel J. Boorstin
45. “Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking” – Antonio Machado
46. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” – Anais Nin
47. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey.” – Barbara Hoffman
48. “If you actually look like your passport photo, you aren’t well enough to travel.” – Sir Vivian Fuchs
49. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” – Herman Melville
50. “I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.” – Lord Byron
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
“Just do something!” – Simon Tierney of Quest Overseas about young people not wasting their gap year.
I like that one. Very straight to the point! Thanks Andy.
My favorite is from Lao Tzu: “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
Wow.
I’m motivated
My fave is no. 25 “You lose sight of things… and when you travel, everything balances out.” – Daranna Gidel
Thanks Andy, for sharing this!
“Not to go anywhere, but to go…travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
Robert Lewis Stevenson
We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. – Pico Iyer
I always liked the Miriam Beard quote. Another of my favorites is this one from Bill Bryson:
“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 only have 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.”
These are great! I recently read a National Geographic article whose author said: “Whoever made the world went to a lot of trouble, and it would be downright rude not to see as much of it as possible.” I loved that one too!
Good one Callie!
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