75 Quotes About Adventure and Travel to Inspire Your Wanderlust
Looking for the best, most inspiring quotes on adventure and travel to inspire your wanderlust? Here are 75 travel quotes, personally curated by us to inspire you.
There was a time when quotes on adventure or travel inspired us a lot.
It's kind of funny/sad looking back upon it; the two of us in our little cubicles at our respective workplaces, emailing each other beautifully designed travel quotes (weheartit was life!) all through the dull winter working days, discussing how one day we’d be living our life by these very same quotes.
Our workplace productivity might have been questionable, our emails cheesy AF, but we related to them and in some small way they drove us to follow the life of travel we dreamed about.
Fast forward five years, and in many ways, we are actually living by many of those quotes.
We’re not going to say they were the sole reason for us to follow our dreams - nor that our life has become some kind of poetic dream - but they certainly sowed the seed to live the life we’d always dreamed about. Heck, we even own a beautiful old bronze compass with Mim’s favourite travel poem, “the road not taken” by Robert Frost inscribed in its lid now.
Although these same travel quotes now fill Instagram captions and Pinterest feeds daily (shameless plug: go follow our Pinterest account right now!), they still hold a special place in our hearts - which is why we really wanted to share our faves with you and hope that you will be inspired to follow your dreams, a little like we were.
So here are our favourite quotes about adventure and travel to inspire you to live that life you've always dreamed about.
75 INCREDIBLE QUOTES ABOUT ADVENTURE AND TRAVEL
OUR PERSONAL FAVOURITE TRAVEL QUOTES
Kicking it off, we're sharing our personal favourite travel and adventure quotes. These are the ones that hold a special place in our hearts as they’re the ones that drove us to make some crazy/great life decisions. We think they might do the same for you.
1. The joy of discovery is the single most important thing in life. Don’t forget it.
-- The Common Wanderer
2. As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.
-- Robin S. Sharma
3. Better an oops than a what if
-- Beau Taplin
4. And then there is the greatest risk of all - the risk of not spending your life doing what you want on the bet that you can buy yourself the freedom later to do it
-- Randy Komisar
5. There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to keep moving, to never stop
-- Bill Bryson
6. 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
7. Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure
-- Bob Bitchin
8. 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.
-- Pico Iyer
9. If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home
-- James A Michener
10. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city
-- Bill Bryson
11. I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
-- Mary Anne Radmacher
12. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
-- Henry David Thoreau
13. 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
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MOST INSPIRING TRAVEL QUOTES
Everyone needs a little inspiration every now and then. Whether it's finally tackling that challenge you've been putting off for, well, forever, or getting pumped up for your next adventure; we think these quotes will have you running for Nepal’s Annapurna Circuit or exploring Africa (check out these Africa safari quotes!) in no time!
14. Certainly, travel is more than seeing the sights, it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living
-- Mary Ritter Beard
15. 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
16. Adventure should be 80 percent 'I think this is manageable,' but it's good to have that last 20 percent where you're right outside your comfort zone. Still safe, but outside your comfort zone
-- Bear Grylls
17. 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
18. At the very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure
-- Christopher McCandless
19. 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
20. Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
-- Ernest Hemingway
21. Adventure isn’t hanging on a rope off the side of a mountain. Adventure is an attitude that we must apply to the day to day obstacles in life.
-- John Amatt
22. 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
23. Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
-- Ray Bradbury
24. Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.
-- Ma Jian
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QUOTES FROM THE ROAD
#VanLife is a massive source of inspiration for us. In fact, it’s our long-held dream to buy a Volkswagen Combi and drive through Europe, totally free to do what we want, when we want. There's just something about that feeling of taking off for a long road trip, windows down, music blasting, and nothing but the open road and exciting memories to be made ahead of you. The #VanLife movement has spawned some incredible adventure quotes, which inevitably lead us to hours of daydreaming.
These are the best road trip quotes to drive your next adventures (pun intended).
25. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
-- Jack Kerouac
26. Because the greatest part of a road trip isn’t arriving at your destination. It’s all the wild stuff that happens along the way.
-- Emma Chase
27. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference
-- Robert Frost
28. Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire.
-- Jennifer Lee
29. Then one day, when you least expect it, the great adventure finds you.
-- Ewan McGregor
30. Don’t die without embracing the daring adventure your life was meant to be.
-- Steve Pavlina
31. Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.
-- Jack Kerouac
32. The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.
-- Aaron Lauritsen
33. Road trips required a couple of things: a well-balanced diet of caffeine, salt and sugar and an excellent selection of tunes—oh, and directions.
-- Jenn McKinlay
exploring namibia by road: photos to inspire your namibian road trip
QUOTES ABOUT MOUNTAINS
Mountains light a fire in the belly and satisfy a deep craving for nature and connection for many of us. They're also the inspiration for some of the greatest adventure quotes out there! These quotes will have you hiking the nearest snow-capped peak in no time.
34. “Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you. Great things are done when men and mountains meet.
-- William Blake
35. I learn something every time I go into the mountains.
-- Michael Kennedy
36. How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains
-- John Muir
37. When you go to the mountains, you see them and admire them. In a sense, they give you challenge, and you try to express that challenge by climbing them.
-- Edmund Hillary
38. The mountains, the forest, and the sea, render men savage; they develop the fierce, but yet do not destroy the human
-- Victor Hugo
39. Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity.
-- John Muir
keen to hike in the mountains of nepal? read our comprehensive guide to nepal
QUOTES ABOUT THE JOY OF DISCOVERY
The reason we travel is the joy of discovering something new, stepping into the unknown and learning about different cultures, places, and people (and, often, ourselves in the process too). These quotes sum up the joy of discovery pretty bloody well.
40. I need to move around a bit. to shuffle my surroundings. To wake up in cities i don’t know my way around and have conversations in languages i cannot entirely comprehend. There is always this tremendous longing in my heart to be lost, to be someplace else, to be far far away from all of this.
-- Beau Taplin
41. As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.
-- Robin S. Sharma
42. I hope you never stop seeing the world, even when your eyes are closed
-- Rashiki
43. The wish to travel seems characteristically human; the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown
-- Paul Theroux
44. Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.
-- Irving Waller
45. The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
46. It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.
-- Anthony Bourdain
47. Adventure is worthwhile in itself.
-- Amelia Earhart
48. 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
49. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson
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COMMON, CLICHED OVERUSED TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE QUOTES WHICH WE STILL SECRETLY ENJOY
You know, we know them, everyone knows them. These are the travel quotes all over Pinterest, Instagram, and every online platform, adored by everyone - even though deep down we all know they're so cliched they're worthy of much eye-rolling. Yet despite all that, they're popular for a reason, and we still think these quotes are pretty awesome:
50. Not all those who wander are lost
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
51. To move to breathe to fly to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live
-- Hans Christian Anderson
52. Oh the places you’ll go.
-- Dr Seuss
53. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things 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
54. Once a year, go somewhere you've never been before
-- Unknown
55. Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures..
- anonymous PostSecret user
56. If you think adventures are dangerous, try routine: It’s Lethal.
-- Paul Coelho
57. Travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living
-- Unknown
58. The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart
-- Helen Keller
59. Travel far enough, you meet yourself.
-- David Mitchell
60. The gladdest moment in human life, me thinks, is a departure into unknown lands.
-- Sir Richard Burton
61. Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination
-- Roy M. Goodman
62. Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
-- Gustav Flaubert
63. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
-- Helen Keller
64. People don’t take trips, trips take people.
-- John Steinbeck
65. To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
-- Aldous Huxley
66. The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.
-- Saint Augustine
67. One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.
-- William Feather
68. Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.
-- Jack Kerouac
69. Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.
-- T.S Eliot
70. You lose sight of things, and when you travel, everything balances out.
-- Daranna Gidel
71. I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I’ve never been before
-- Bill Bryson
72. When a young person is moved by a passion and feels compelled to go on this sort of quest, I think you have to let him. You can't stop him. In our culture we don't have formal rights of passage like in some ancient cultures. Subjecting yourself to risk... may be something you have to go through to be a man or a woman.
-- Jon Krakauer
73. There is no certainty - there is only adventure
-- Roberto Assagioli
74. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
-- Susan Sontag
75. Traveling — it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.
-- Ibn Battuta
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What's your favourite travel quote? Add yours in the comments below!
