100 Wanderlust Travel Quotes to Inspire Your Next Adventure

Need a Sign to Travel? These 100 Wanderlust Quotes Are It

Craving adventure or feeling nostalgic for past travels? These 100 wanderlust quotes are here to spark your imagination and remind you why you fell in love with exploring in the first place. Let these words transport you, inspire your next trip, and keep your travel spirit burning bright in between journeys.

1. “Not all those who wander are lost.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

2. “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” ― Mark Twain

3. “The Road Not Taken
   
   Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
   And sorry I could not travel both
   And be one traveler, long I stood
   And looked down one as far as I could
   To where it bent in the undergrowth;
   
   Then took the other, as just as fair,
   And having perhaps the better claim,
   Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
   Though as for that the passing there
   Had worn them really about the same,
   
   And both that morning equally lay
   In leaves no step had trodden black.
   Oh, I kept the first for another day!
   Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
   I doubted if I should ever come back.
   
   I shall be telling this with a sigh
   Somewhere ages and ages hence:
   Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
   I took the one less traveled by,
   And that has made all the difference.”
   ― Robert Frost

4. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” ― St. Augustine

5. “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, A Hat Full of Sky

6. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
   ― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

7. “Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry.” ― Jack Kerouac

8. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ― Lao Tzu

9. “Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

10. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” ― Anita Desai

11. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” ― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

12. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” ― Lao Tzu

13. “When I was a child, adults would tell me not to make things up, warning me of what would happen if I did. As far as I can tell so far, it seems to involve lots of foreign travel and not having to get up too early in the morning.”
    ― Neil Gaiman, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fiction and Illusions

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, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

15. “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.” ― Anthony Bourdain

16. “Travel brings power and love back into your life.” ― Rumi Jalalud-Din

17. “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: Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt

18. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” ― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

19. “We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
    ― Robert Louis Stevenson

20. “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” ― G.K. Chesterton

21. “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, Tom Sawyer Abroad

22. “All that is gold does not glitter,
    Not all those who wander are lost.”
    ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

23. “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

24. “And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived.”
    ― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

25. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
    ― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson's Essays

26. “I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.” ― Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

27. “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” ― Judith Thurman

28. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ― Gustave Flaubert

29. “Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.” ― Charles Dickens

30. “because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...” ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

31. “No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself.” ― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

32. “Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.” ― Jerry Seinfeld

33. “One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” ― Henry Miller

34. “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

35. “may came home with a smooth round stone
    as small as a world and as large as alone.”
    ― E.E. Cummings

36. “To travel is to live.” ― Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography

37. “Wherever you go, you take yourself with you.” ― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

38. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” ― mary anne radmacher

39. “Augustus," I said. "Really. You don't have to do this."
    "Sure I do," he said. "I found my Wish."
    "God, you're the best," I told him.
    "I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel," he answered.”
    ― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

40. “Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.” ― Ma Jian, Red Dust: A Path Through China

41. “It is a curious thing, but as one travels the world getting older and older, it appears that happiness is easier to get used to than despair. The second time you have a root beer float, for instance, your happiness at sipping the delicious concoction may not be quite as enormous as when you first had a root beer float, and the twelfth time your happiness may be still less enormous, until root beer floats begin to offer you very little happiness at all, because you have become used to the taste of vanilla ice cream and root beer mixed together. However, the second time you find a thumbtack in your root beer float, your despair is much greater than the first time, when you dismissed the thumbtack as a freak accident rather than part of the scheme of a soda jerk, a phrase which here means "ice cream shop employee who is trying to injure your tongue," and by the twelfth time you find a thumbtack, your despair is even greater still, until you can hardly utter the phrase "root beer float" without bursting into tears. It is almost as if happiness is an acquired taste, like coconut cordial or ceviche, to which you can eventually become accustomed, but despair is something surprising each time you encounter it.”
    ― Lemony Snicket, The End

42. “Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.” ― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

43. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”
    ― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

44. “Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost.” ― Erol Ozan

45. “to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

46. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.” ― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

47. “A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time” ― Homer, The Odyssey

48. “I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.”
    ― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

49. “People travel to wonder
    at the height of the mountains,
    at the huge waves of the seas,
    at the long course of the rivers,
    at the vast compass of the ocean,
    at the circular motion of the stars,
    and yet they pass by themselves
    without wondering. ”
    ― St. Augustine

50. “There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I'm born to leave.” ― Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps

51. “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

52. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters

53. “See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.”
    ― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

54. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
    ― James A. Michener

55. “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

56. “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

57. “The steward just asked me if I was not afraid to travel alone, and I said, "Why, it is life.”
    ― Emily Hahn, Congo Solo: Misadventures Two Degrees North

58. “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

59. “You are still young, free.. Do yourself a favor. Before it's too late, without thinking too much about it first, pack a pillow and a blanket and see as much of the world as you can. You will not regret it. One day it will be too late.” ― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake

60. “The journey itself is my home.” ― Matsuo Basho

61. “Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonalds? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria's mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once.” ― Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

62. “If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and 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 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

63. “Travelling's not something you're good at. It's something you do. Like breathing. You can't work too much at it, or it feels like work. You have to surrender yourself to the chaos. To the accidents.” ― Gayle Forman , Just One Day

64. “Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.”
    ― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings

65. “By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”
    ― Virginia Woolf

66. “Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.” ― Tennesse Williams, Camino Real

67. “Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive”
    ― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

68. “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage” ― Paulo Coelho, Aleph

69. “Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.” ― Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care

70. “There's a race of men that don't fit in,
    A race that can't sit still;
    So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will.
    They range the field and rove the flood,
    And they climb the mountain's crest; Their's is the curse of the gypsy blood,
    And they don't know how to rest.”
    ― Robert Service

71. “Traveling 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, sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” ― Cesare Pavese

72. “Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life - and travel - leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks - on your body or on your heart - are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt.” ― Anthony Bourdain, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones

73. “So, here you are
    too foreign for home
    too foreign for here.
    Never enough for both.”
    ― Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

74. “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.”
    ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections

75. “Still, despite all this, traveling is the great true love of my life. I have always felt, ever since I was sixteen years old and first went to Russia with my saved-up babysitting money, that to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice. I am loyal and constant in my love for travel, as I have not always been loyal and constant in my other loves. I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless, newborn baby--I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to--I just don't care.”
    ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

76. “No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.” ― Patrick Rothfuss

77. “Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.”
    ― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination

78. “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

79. “When one is traveling, everything looks brighter and lovelier. That does not mean it IS brighter and lovelier; it just means that sweet, kindly home suffers in comparison to tarted-up foreign places with all their jewels on.”
    ― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

80. “Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour - but in face I am that kind of person.” ― John Green, Paper Towns

81. “It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancholies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.” ― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt

82. “The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” ― Christopher McCandless

83. “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. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.” ― Anthony Bourdain

84. “Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.” ― Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

85. “I'm inspired by the people I meet in my travels--hearing their stories, seeing the hardships they overcome, their fundamental optimism and decency. I'm inspired by the love people have for their children. And I'm inspired by my own children, how full they make my heart. They make me want to work to make the world a little bit better. And they make me want to be a better man.” ― Barack Obama

86. “For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.” ― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

87. “As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.” ― Siddhārtha Gautama

88. Someday, I would like to go home. The exact location of this place, I don't know, but someday I would like to go. There would be a pleasing feeling of familiarity and a sense of welcome in everything I saw. People would greet me warmly. They would remind me of the length of my absence and the thousands of miles I had travelled in those restless years, but mostly, they would tell me that I had been missed, and that things were better now I had returned. Autumn would come to this place of welcome, this place I would know to be home. Autumn would come and the air would grow cool, dry and magic, as it does that time of the year. At night, I would walk the streets but not feel lonely, for these are the streets of my home town. These are the streets that I had thought about while far away, and now I was back, and all was as it should be. The trees and the falling leaves would welcome me. I would look up at the moon, and remember seeing it in countries all over the world as I had restlessly journeyed for decades, never remembering it looking the same as when viewed from my hometown.” ― Henry Rollins

89. “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

90. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you
    control it.” ― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

91. “The world is a book, and those who don't travel only read one page.” ― St. Augustine

92. “Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.” ― Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

93. “It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.” ― Danzy Senna

94. “I'm on vacation. Vacations always end. It's the very fact that it's finite that makes traveling special. You could move to any one of those destinations you loved in small doses, and it wouldn't be the spellbinding, life-altering seven days you spend there as a guest, letting a place into your heart fully, letting it change you.” ― Emily Henry, People We Meet on Vacation

95. “Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.” ― Ray Bradbury

96. “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, No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach

97. “Traveling—it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” ― Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battutah

98. “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

99. “Don't let your luggage define your travels, each life unravels differently.” ― Shane Koyczan

100. “This is your life. Do what you want and do it often.
     If you don't like something, change it.
     If you don't like your job, quit.
     If you don't have enough time, stop watching TV.
     If you are looking for the love of your life, stop; they will be waiting for you when you start doing things you love.
     Stop over-analysing, life is simple.
     All emotions are beautiful.
     When you eat, appreciate every last bite.
     Life is simple.
     Open your heart, mind and arms to new things and people, we are united in our differences.
     Ask the next person you see what their passion is and share your inspiring dream with them.
     Travel often; getting lost will help you find yourself.
     Some opportunities only come once, seize them.
     Life is about the people you meet and the things you create with them, so go out and start creating.
     Life is short, live your dream and wear your passion.”
     ― Holstee Manifesto, The Wedding Day