Looking for an inspirational quote to ignite your travel bug? We’ve got you covered.
Last updated: August 19, 2025
Travel Quotes to Ignite Your Wanderlust
What are these so-called inspirational quotes? They are provoking words with incredible power. Inspirational quotes lift you up in the moments of despair and uncertainty. They inspire you to be your best, try new things, explore more, and see the world outside of your comfort zone. For travelers – or future explorers – inspirational quotes are those ignition keys that tickle your travel bug and kick-start the wanderlust journey.
Below I list some of my all-time favorite sayings and quotes that ignited my wanderlust at one point or another. I hope they will inspire you, too, to push yourself a little bit harder, to get outside and explore more. But before you set off on this incredible journey remember what Cesare Pavese had to say about travel:
“Travel is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and lose sight of all that familiar comforts of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things. Air, Sleep, Dream, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
INSPIRATIONS QUOTES TO IGNITE YOUR TRAVEL BUG
Short Travel Quotes
1. Traveling is not something you’re good at. It’s something you do like breathing. – Gayle Forman
2. We travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us. – Anonymous
3. Travel doesn’t become an adventure until you leave yourself behind. – Marty Rubin
4. Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before. – Dalai Lama
5. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. – Mark Twain
6. 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
7. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust
8. Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller. – Ibn Battuta
READ MORE: 7 Books to Help You Become a Better Writer and Storyteller
Travel Quotes that Change Your Life
9. It is probably a pity that every citizen of each state cannot visit all the others, to see the differences, to lean what we have in common, and come back with a richer, fuller understanding of America – in all its beauty, in all its dignity, in all its strength, in support or moral principles. – Dwight D. Eisenhower
10. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all – the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later. – Randy Komisar
11. Traveling isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind. – Anthony Bourdain
12. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that 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. – Mark Twain
13. An adventure may be worn as a muddy spot or it may be worn as a proud insignia. It is the woman wearing it who makes it the one thing or the other. – Norma Shearer
Read Next
- TRAVEL BOOKS: 15 Travel Books that Will Spark Your Wanderlust
- WANDERLUST: 9 Ways to Cure Your Wanderlust without Traveling
