Quotes About Travel

21 quotes

Thomas Jefferson thought one travels more usefully alone, because the solitary traveller reflects. George Bernard Shaw wanted the opposite of comfort on the road, saying he disliked feeling at home when he was abroad. Rumi wrote that travel brings power and love back into your life.

Not everyone admired the returning traveller. Jonathan Swift called a young traveller just returned from abroad, usually, the worst-bred person in company. Lao Tzu praised a lighter way of moving through the world: a good traveller leaves no tracks. Kahlil Gibran wrote of departure as eagerness with sails full set, awaiting the wind. Bashō regretted a fall from his horse that a walking stick might have spared him. James Joyce imagined travelling round in front of the sun to steal a day's march on it and never grow a day older.
Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete

Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one’s prejudices.

— The Happy Prince and Other Tales

American author and humorist

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.

— Tom Sawyer Abroad

English modernist writer

They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought[.]

— Jacob's Room

French novelist, poet, dramatist and politician

What is more melancholy and more profound than to see a thousand objects for the first and the last time? To travel is to be born and to die at every instant...

— Les Misérables

English writer and philologist

Oh! That was poetry!" said Pippin. "Do you really mean to start before the break of day?

— The Fellowship of the Ring

Founding Father, U.S. president from 1801 to 1809

I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect

— The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 11: January 1787 to August 1787

English mystery and detective writer

What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.

— The Clocks

French writer

In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library.

— Journey to the Center of the Earth

Danish writer and poet

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.

— The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography

Japanese poet（1644–1694）

Had I crossed the pass / Supported by a stick, I would have spared myself / The fall from the horse.

— The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches

Argentine Marxist revolutionary

I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.

— The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

French general and statesman

How can you be expected to govern a country that has 246 kinds of cheese?

German writer, artist, natural scientist and politician

Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.

— Italian Journey

French writer

But what then? What had he really gained by all this trouble? What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so;...Truly, would you not for less than that go around the world?

— Around the World in Eighty Days

English writer and philologist

End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take.

— The Return of the King

French writer

I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!

— Journey to the Center of the Earth

French writer

...why, I've just this instant found out... that we might have gone around the world in only seventy-eight days.

— Around the World in Eighty Days