It can sometimes be hard to put words to experiences. Why do you love to travel? How do you feel when you travel? Here are some quotes and reflections that just might resonate with your own travel experiences.
Photo of Traveler (modified) © The Preiser Project
1. “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
2. “The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.” – Russell Baker
3. “Jet lag is for amateurs.” – Dick Clark
4. “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
5. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” – Rudyard Kipling
6. “People don’t take trips. . .trips take people.” – John Steinbeck
7. “Adventure is worthwhile in itself.” – Amelia Earhart
8. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” – Anais Nin
9. “The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” – Anna Quindlen
10. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G.K. Chesterton
Photo of Walking Tour, New York City (modified) © Stacie
11. “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” – Lawrence Block
12. “Hey, people who travel with their bed pillow. You look insane. ” – Jim Gaffigan
13. “There’s only four ways to get unraveled; One is to sleep and the other is travel.” – Jim Morrison
14. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes
15. “I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” — Rosalia de Castro
16. “Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin.
17. “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” – Alan Keightley
18. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” – Aldous Huxley
19. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman
20. “Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.” – Fitzhugh Mullan
Photo of Mountain Road, India (modified) © Sundaram Ramaswamy
21. “When you hand someone a camera, why do they act like you just asked them to dissemble a bomb? They take it and they’re like, ‘What do I do … I don’t really … ha-huh …’ Yeah, it’s the button on the top right where it always is since the beginning of #*@! time!” – Dane Cook
22. “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.” – Douglas Adams
23. “You want to know what it’s like to be on a plane for 22 hours? Sit in a chair, squeeze your head as hard as you can, don’t stop, then take a paper bag and put it over your mouth and nose and breath your own air over and over and over.” – Lewis Black
24. “My fear of flying starts as soon as I buckle myself in and then the guy up front mumbles a few unintelligible words then before I know it I’m thrust into the back of my seat by acceleration that seems way too fast and the rest of the trip is an endless nightmare of turbulence, of near misses. And then the cabbie drops me off at the airport.” – Dennis Miller
35. “A child on a farm sees a plane fly by overhead and dreams of a faraway place A traveler on the plane sees the farmhouse and dreams of home.” – Carl Burns
26. “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.” – Bill Bryson
27. “Travel like Ghandi, with simple clothes, open eyes and an uncluttered mind.” – Rick Steves
28. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” — James Michener
29. “When you come to a fork in the road….take it” – Yogi Berra
30. “Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.” – Charles Kuralt
Photo of Traveler and Guide Book (modified) © Pietro & Silvia
31. “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.” – George Bernard Shaw
32. “Living on Earth is expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun every year.” – Unknown
33. “I get pretty much all the exercise I need walking down airport concourses carrying bags.” – Guy Clark
34. “People say there’s delays on flights. Delays, really? New York to California in five hours, that used to take 30 years, a bunch of people used to die on the way there, have a baby, you would end up with a whole different group of people by the time you got there. Now you watch a movie and [go to the toilet] and you’re home.” – Louis C.K.
35. “What does it mean to pre-board? Do you get on before you get on?” – George Carlin
36. “I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.” – Caskie Stinnett
37. “Hide your gold, your faith and the reason of you journey.” – E. Heine
38. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” – Herman Melville
39. “Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.” – Lisa St. Aubin de Teran
40. “Travel works best when you’re forced to come to terms with the place you’re in.” – Paul Theroux
Photo of Sunrise in the Philippines (modified) © Bro. Jeffrey Pioquinto, SJ
41. “Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” – Susan Sontag
42. “People come back from flights and tell you a story like it’s a horror story. That’s how bad they make it sound. They’re like, ‘It was the worst day of my life. We didn’t board for 20 minutes and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes.’ Oh really? What happened next? Did you fly in the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero?’” – Louis C.K.
43. “Airplane travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.” — Al Gore
44. “If at some point you don’t ask yourself “What have I gotten myself into?” then you’re not doing it right. – Roland Gau
45. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” – David Mitchell
46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux
47. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley
48. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck
49. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” – Susan Sontag
50. “The impulse of travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.” – Agnes Repplier
Photo of Washington Ferry (modified) © woodleywonderworks
51. “Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.” – Frank Herbert
52. “An adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” – G.K. Chesterton
53. “Did you ever notice that the first piece of luggage on the carousel never belongs to anyone?” – Erma Bombeck
54. “Just got back from a pleasure trip: I took my mother-in-law to the airport.” – Henny Youngman
55. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” – Oscar Wilde
56. “When traveling with someone, take large does of patience and tolerance with your morning coffee.” – Helen Hayes
57. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill
58. “To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery, but a ritual of reassurance.” – Philip Andrew Adams
59. “The Gentle Reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the Gentle Reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.” – Mark Twain
60. “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” – Saint Augustine
61. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot
Photo of Pyrenees (modified) © Nelson L.
62. “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” – Lao Tzu
63. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” – Maya Angelou
64. “People don’t take trips – trips take people.” – John Steinbeck
65. “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
66. “If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands but a continent that joins to them.” – Francis Bacon
67. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travels sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
68. “Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.” – Eudora Welty
