18 Quotes About Traveling (And Who Actually Said Them)
Travel quotes get passed around so often that most of them have lost their source along the way.
Short Travel Quotes
These are the ones that fit on a trailhead sign or the back of a postcard.
“Not all those who wander are lost.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake.” — Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes, 1879
“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” — Tao Te Ching, chapter 27, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation
“The journey is the reward.”
“To travel is to live.”
Quotes About Travel and Adventure
The overlap between travel writing and hiking writing is almost total, and John Muir sits in the middle of it.
“The mountains are calling and I must go.” — John Muir, in an 1873 letter to his sister Sarah
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.” — John Muir, Our National Parks, 1901
“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” — Amelia Earhart
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” — H. Jackson Brown Jr., P.S. I Love You, 1990
That last one is worth a note. It is attributed to Mark Twain on roughly half the internet, and it appears nowhere in his work. Brown was quoting his mother.
“The best view comes after the hardest climb.”
Inspirational Quotes About Traveling
These are the older lines, and the ones that survive rereading.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” — Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.” — Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, 1923
The shortened version you usually see — “not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes” — is a paraphrase, not what Proust wrote.
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” — Richard Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, 1670
This one is credited to Saint Augustine almost everywhere. Researchers have never found it in his writing. Lassels, an English travel writer, is the earliest known source.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.” — Tao Te Ching, chapter 64
Travel Quotes for Closer to Home
Not every trip worth taking needs a passport, and a weekend on a coastal trail counts.
“You do not need to go far to go somewhere new.”
“Take the long way. The short way only gets you there.”
“The map is not the territory, and the photograph is not the view.”
“Go while your legs still want to.”
If a stretch of coast is the trip you have in mind, the Big Sur captions list covers the same ground with shorter lines built for photos.
How to Use These Without Sounding Like Everyone Else
Pair the quote with something specific from the actual trip.
A line about wandering means very little on its own and quite a lot under a photo of the exact junction where you took the wrong trail.
Keep the attribution attached when there is one. It costs six words and it is the difference between a quote and a caption.
Skip any line you would not say out loud.
FAQ
Did Mark Twain say “twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do”?
No. It comes from H. Jackson Brown Jr.’s 1990 book P.S. I Love You, where he attributes it to his mother. The Twain attribution only appears from the 1990s onward.
Who really said “the world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page”?
The earliest known source is Richard Lassels in The Voyage of Italy, 1670. There is no evidence Saint Augustine wrote it.
What is the most famous travel quote?
“Not all those who wander are lost” is probably the most reproduced, and unusually for this genre the attribution is solid — it is Tolkien, from a poem in The Fellowship of the Ring.
Why are so many travel quotes misattributed?
Attaching a famous name makes a line more shareable, and once it circulates for a few years the false credit is repeated more often than the true one. Quote sites copy each other rather than checking sources.
Are these free to use?
Short quotations with attribution are standard practice for captions and posts. The lines listed without a name are common sayings with no identifiable author.
