Travel is my answer, my cure-all for almost everything, so when I’m not out adventuring, sometimes I start to feel uninspired.
What that happens, I either make a trip manifest, or thumb through Instagram to see others living their best lives out in the world, or reread quotes that remind me of two things: one, there is always more travel ahead, and two, travel is such a beautiful thing that it can inspire you long after you’ve done it.
So, here are my all-time favorite travel quotes, the ones that aren’t clichés, aren’t overused and most importantly, aren’t corny.
1. “Now more than ever do I realize I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.” —Isabelle Eberhardt
2. “This is why once you’ve traveled for the first time all you want to do is leave again. They call it the travel bug, but really it’s the effort to return to a place where you are surrounded by people who speak the same language as you. Not English or Spanish or Mandarin or Portuguese, but that language where others know what it’s like to leave, change, grow, experience, learn, then go home again and feel more lost in your hometown than you did in the most foreign place you visited. This is the hardest part about traveling, and it’s the very reason why we all run away again.” —Kellie Donnelly
3. “One travels to run away from routine. That dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.” —Ella Maillart
4. “Wanderlust consumed her; foreign hearts and exotic minds compelled her. She had a gypsy soul and a vibrant hope for the unknown.” —D. Marie
5. And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, 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
6. “I find myself becoming greedy. Greedy for new experiences, new sights and cities. I’ve become an addict for adventure, and I’m afraid there is no cure.”—C.M.T.
7. “The best part about airports lies in what they symbolize. Airports are places of bookends: new beginnings and long-awaited endings, arrivals and departures, hellos and goodbyes. We start in one city to end in another hundreds or thousand miles away. You enter from a desert and exit into a blizzard. In from winter, out into summer. In from familiarity, out into something completely foreign. Or vice versa. An airport is a place of transit, and not just geographically. I wish there was some sort of time-lapse to show how people change between departures and arrivals. When I arrive back home from being away, I’m never the same person I was when I left.” —Alex Brueckner
8. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
9. “To travel is to live.” —Hans Christian Andersen
10. “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
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