20 Best Travel Quotes to Inspire and Uplift

Here at The International Kitchen, we love travel, and we love travel quotes. We believe that travel is not only fun, but that it is actually good for you (more on that here)! And nothing explains that as succinctly as a well-turned inspirational travel quote.

There are hundreds and hundreds of enticing travel quotes out there – just do a quick search and you’ll see what I mean, but be carefully of getting sucked in to not only the quotes but the accompanying images.

Here we’ve compiled twenty of our favorite travel quotes. The criteria? Merely that they speak to us on a really deep level.

Inspirational: Life is a Journey

Many travel quotes aren’t only about taking a trip – unless by trip you mean also the journey of life. These are some of the most inspirational of quotes, because while at face value they speak to the traveler, they can easily relate to all of life’s twists and turns.

Perhaps my favorite:

Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in an office or mowing your lawn. Climb that damn mountain.
– Jack Kerouac

But other honorable mentions:

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
– Confucius

Don’t count the days. Make the days count.
– Muhammad Ali

Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey.
– Babs Hoffman

As I write this, we are almost a year into the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S., so these last seem particularly important. I am most definitely not comparing an international, deadly pandemic to a pothole. But one thing I’ve learned as COVID has gone on month after month is that I have to find a way to enjoy the trip despite all the trials, fear, and loss we have experienced.

And other good one, because the Dalai Lama is always a good source for inspiration:

Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.
– Dalai Lama

Sure, as a tour operator, I want to say this simply means you should take a trip to a new destination each year. But I think it can also be read metaphorically, encouraging you go someplace new in your own self-development. It is saying, quite simply, take a risk!

Check out all our culinary tours. 

Educational: Travel is Good for You

Some of our favorite travel quotes are the ones that show how travel is good for you, how it can expand your horizons and therefore expand your mind, how it can teach us perspective, tolerance, and a host of other good things.

Some of the best examples of this type of travel quote? Check them out:

A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.
– Oliver Wendell Holmes

Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
– Gustave Flaubert

We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.
– Anais Nin

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

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

If you are thirty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn to be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors, if you have to. Find out how other people live and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.
– Anthony Bourdain

Check out what we think of Stanley Tucci’s “Searching for Italy” TV series.

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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
– Mark Twain

And perhaps my favorite, because it is so succinct and presents such an easily understandable image:

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
– St. Augustine of Hippo

Sustainable: The Responsible Traveler

One of the most famous travel quotes is attributed to Chief Seattle, a 19th-century Squamish and Duwamish chief after whom the city of Seattle is named, and it perfectly encapsulates the idea of responsible, or “green,” tourism:

Take only memories, leave only footprints.
– Chief Seattle

National: On Domestic Travel

Domestic travel quotes? Yes! There is no need to get inspired only to travel abroad, there is plenty of motivation to find for exploring our own country. Especially when COVID has forced travel restrictions, don’t think there isn’t still plenty to see and enjoy in your own corner of the world. For, as the Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni once said:

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

Or, perhaps more timely these days, consider the words of Dwight Eisenhower:

It is probably a pity that every citizen of each state cannot visit all the others, to see the differences, to learn what we have in common, and come back with a richer, fuller understanding of America – in all its beauty, in all its dignity, in all its strength, in support of moral principles.
– Dwight D. Eisenhower

Unconventional: Quirky Travel Quotes

And, finally, some travel quotes we like simply because they are fun, funny, or make us shout, Yes!

Paris is always a good idea.
– Audrey Hepburn

People don’t take trips, trips take people.
– John Steinbeck

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
– Susan Sontag

Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.
– Anonymous

What is your favorite travel quote? Do you find they inspire you to want to take a trip (perhaps a culinary vacation with us)? Or do they inspire you to live your life in a certain way?

By Peg Kern

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