Travel has always been a profound source of inspiration for writers, prompting them to reflect on the beauty, wonder, and transformative power of exploration. Here, we’ve gathered some timeless quotes about travel from renowned literary figures that capture the essence of the adventurer’s spirit.
- Mark Twain: “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.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien: “Not all those who wander are lost.”
- Paulo Coelho: “When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”
- Jack Kerouac: “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.”
- Susan Sontag: “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
- Pico Iyer: “Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.”
- Anais Nin: “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other places, other lives, other souls.”
- Mary Oliver: “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
- Gustave Flaubert: “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
- Ernest Hemingway: “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
- Isabelle Eberhardt: “Wanderers, vagabonds, and drifters have been the inspiration for the greatest art of all time.”
- G.K. Chesterton: “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.”
- Henry Miller: “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
- Hilaire Belloc: “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
- Jhumpa Lahiri: “That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.”
- Matsuo Basho: “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
- Eudora Welty: “The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”
- Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
- John Steinbeck: “People don’t take trips; trips take people.”
These quotes from famous writers remind us that travel is not merely a physical journey but also a journey of the soul, a quest for self-discovery, and an opportunity to gain a broader perspective on life. It’s an invitation to embrace the unknown, savor the beauty of the world, and, in the process, discover more about ourselves.
Photo by Simon Berger
