Travel quotes inspire dreams for the coming year

Call me a romantic, but travel quotes inspire me, excite me, encourage me to dream about the next adventure.

And they underscore what I’ve learned through my own travels: wanderlust isn’t something that can be cured; you learn about your home when you leave it; the less you take, the better; embracing adventure and opening your eyes leads to new insights; travel isn’t always easy but it’s worth the challenges of getting lost; and it changes you in ways you couldn’t foresee.

But don’t take it from me. Here are wise words from other travellers to fuel your adventurous dreams for 2022.

Wanderlust

“The Wanderlust has got me… by the belly-aching fire.” – Robert W. Service

“Oh, the places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss

“If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” – Rachel Wolchin

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.” – Isabelle Eberhardt

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost

Life is short

“Take every chance you get in life, because some things only happen once.” – Karen Gibbs

“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

“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

Learn about home

“A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.” – Henry Rollins

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” – G. K. Chesterton

“There are two ways of getting home, and one of them is to stay there. The other is to walk round the whole world till we come back to the same place.” – G. K. Chesterton

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – Terry Pratchett

See with new eyes

“Travel like Gandhi, with simple clothes, open eyes and an uncluttered mind.” – Rick Steves

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

“Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard

“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

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G. K. Chesterton

Wise words for the road

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” – Oscar Wilde

“Strangers have a reality for me on the bus that they cannot have on the freeway, simply because we’ve agreed to be in an enclosed space in which we are subject to each other’s actions.” – Jenny Odell  

“No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be.” – Chuck Thompson

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage.” – Paulo Coelho

“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. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” – Bill Bryson

“If you look like your passport photo, you’re too ill to travel.” – Martin Buber

“Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.” – Al Boliska

“There is nothing safer than flying – it’s crashing that is dangerous.” – Theo Cowan

“You define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.” – Paul Theroux

“You don’t have to be rich to travel well.” – Eugene Fodor

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” – Paul Theroux

“Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.” – Izaak Walton

Embrace adventure

“If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it.” – Heraclitus  

“There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate, not a grain more.”– Henry David Thoreau

“A rose looks different when you can smell it. A ballroom looks different when you can hear music.” –Henry Grunwald

“If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine. It’s lethal!” – Paulo Coelho

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine

Why travel?

“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 Andersen

“People who don’t travel cannot have a global view; all they see is what’s in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.” – Martin Yan

“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you have travelled.” – The Prophet Mohammed

Welcome the change in you

“Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” – Anita Desai

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert

“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 where riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and to fall in love once more.” – Pico Iyer

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” – Walt Disney

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain

“Travel 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

Return home

“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” – Lin Yutang

“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

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” – Pat Conroy

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a ride!’.” – Hunter S. Thompson