100+ Wanderlust quotes that will wake up the travel bug inside you

We live in a beautiful world that has no shortage of spectacular places and adventures that are waiting to be discovered and wanderlust is the strong urge to travel the world in pursuit of these unique experiences. And nothing can trigger our wanderlust like inspiring quotes that will make you think, turn your point of view, and inspire you to say yes to adventure and just get out there and see the world. Quotes that are proof that, contrary to the popular belief, a picture isn’t always worth a thousand words. Here are 108 of my favorite wanderlust quotes that will wake up the travel bug inside you.

Popular Wanderlust Quotes

Here are some of the most popular wanderlust quotes that we all know and love. You’ve probably heard some of them.

1. “Not all who wander are lost.”  
― J.R.R. Tolkien

2. “The world is a book and those who don’t travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine

3. “The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.”
― Lao Tzu

4. “Though we travel the world to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

7. “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

8. “The world is a book, and those who don’t travel only read one page.”
― St Augustine

9. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
― Mark Twain

10. “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.”
― Dalai Lama

11. “The world is a book and those who don’t travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

12. “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
― Ibn Battuta

13. “Live without excuses, travel without regret”
― Oscar Wilde

14. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― Andre Gide

15. “With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.”
― Sandra Lake

16. “Only those who risk going too far can find out how far one can go.”
― T.S. Eliot

17. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Adventure Quotes

If you love adventure, you’ll surely love these adventure wanderlust quotes.

18. “To say yes to life is at one and the same thing to say yes to oneself.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

19. “So much of who we are is where we have been.”
― William Langewiesche

20. “Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.”
― Ma Jian

21. “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

22. “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.”
― Erol Ozan

23. “See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.”
― Ray Bradbury,

24. “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Christopher McCandless

25. “No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until no one knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

26. “We live in a wonderful world that’s full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru

27. “Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are detours you didn’t mean to take.”
― Angela N. Blount

Why do we travel quotes

If you’re looking for some travel inspiration or a picturesque way to explain why we travel and where does our lust for wandering come from, you’ll surely love these wanderlust quotes.

28. “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 (A Hat Full of Sky)

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

30. “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts, eyes, and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again; to slow time down, get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
― Pico Iyer

31. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but, by demonstrating that all people 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

32. “I travel because it makes me realize how much I haven’t seen, how much I’m not going to see, and how much I still need to see.”
― Carew Papritz

33. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do- especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road”
— William Least Heat-Moon

34. “The only way to an open mind is by taking a plane into the open world.”
— C. JoyBell C.

Deep wanderlust quotes

If you like deeper quotes that will tickle your brain and make you think about life, these deep wanderlust quotes will inspire you.

35. “My confession is I fall in love with so many places I’m always half broken-hearted by goodbyes. And I don’t believe in burning, and longing. And I believe we leave tiny pieces of ourselves in every place we’ve loved.”
— Victoria Erickson

36. “All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money, or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality. I wanted the open road and new beginnings every day.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

37. “Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.”
― Roman Payne

38. “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
― Pascal Mercier

39. “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”  
― Sarah Frances Brown

Short Wanderlust Quotes

If you’re looking for some short wanderlust quotes to add to your Instagram or other social media posts, these are perfect!

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

41. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

42. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust

43. “Travel brings power and love back into your life.”
― Rumi Jalalud-Din

44. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell

45. “I read, I travel, I become”
― Derek Walcott

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

47. “There ain’t no journey that don’t change you some.”
― David Mitchell

48. “The journey itself is my home.”
― Matsuo Basho

49. “Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
― Anthony Bourdain

50. “So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry”
― Jack Kerouac

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

52. “Wherever you go, go with all of your heart.”
–  Confucius

53. “ To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
–  Aldous Huxley

54. “Travel is the only thing you buy that makes you richer.”
–  Unknown

55. “Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.”
–  Peter Hoeg

56. “Travel is not reward for working, it’s education for living.”
– Anthony Bourdain

57. “The Earth has music for those who listen
–  William Shakespeare

58. “People don’t take trips…trips take people.”
–  John Steinback

59. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”
― Anaïs Nin

60. “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”
– John Muir

61. “It feels good to be lost in the right direction”.  
–  Unknown

Inspiring quotes

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

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

64. “Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else – above all, a travel bureau – arrange everything before-hand?”
― Richard Aldington

65. “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else”
― Lawrence Block

66. “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
― Wendell Berry

67. “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live”
― Albus Dumbledore (Harry Potter)

68. “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

69. “Cover the earth before it covers you.”
— Dagobert D. Runes

70. “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.”
— Erol Ozan

71. “By traveling to all the corners of the globe it allows me to further define the ever-changing world we live in, which in turn helps me to redefine myself, therefore it is an important process towards becoming a complete person.”
— Andrew James Pritchard

72. “Not I, nor anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.”
— Walt Whitman

73. “Traveling solo does not always mean you’re alone. Most often, you meet marvelous people along the way and make connections that last a lifetime.”
— Jacqueline Boone

Destination-seeking quotes

74. “I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.”
― Roman Payne

75. “There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

76. “If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.”
― Anthony Bourdain

77. “Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.”
― Ryu Murakami

78. “It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.”
― Gustave Flaubert,

79. “So I find words I never thought to speak

In streets I never thought I should revisit

When I left my body on a distant shore.”
― T.S. Eliot

80. “You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not… No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald

81. “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”
― Italo Calvino

82. “Nostalgia in reverse, the longing for yet another strange land, grew especially strong in spring.”
― Vladimir Nabokov

Nomad Quotes

83. “There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t sit still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Their’s is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.”
― Robert Service

84. “To belong nowhere is a blessing and a curse, like any kind of freedom.”
― Leah Stewart

85. “He found himself wondering at times, especially in the autumn, about the wildlands, and strange visions of mountains that he had never seen came into his dreams.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

86. “A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.”
― Roman Payne, 

87. “All my life I have lived and behaved very much like the sandpiper just running down the edges of different countries and continents, looking for something.”
― Elizabeth Bishop

88. “Why is it that I can’t be content to live a normal life? Why do I spiral into depression when I am away from the wilderness for too long?”
― Heather Anderson

89. “ Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”
― Anatole France

90. “Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars…”
― Jack Kerouac

91. “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

Quotes to ignite your travel bug

92. “It sounds so far away and different. I like different places. I like any place that isn’t here.”
― Edna Ferber,

93. “If we were meant to stay in one place, we would have roots instead of feet.”
― Rachel Wolchin

94. “When no possessions keep us when no countries contain us, and no time detains us, man becomes a heroic wanderer, and woman, a wanderess.”
― Roman Payne

95. “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. ”
― Agnes Repplier

96. “It’s not the destination where you end up but the mishaps and memories you create along the way!”
― Penelope Riley,

97. “This was what my spirit longed to do, to wander in strange lands. It couldn’t stand being trapped in one body all the time. It had wanderlust.”
― Samantha Shannon,

 98. “I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you’re ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you’re five years old again. You can’t read, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson

99. “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in an office or mowing your lawn. Climb that damn mountain.”
― Jack Kerouac

100. “I’m in love with cities I’ve never been to and people I’ve never met.”
― John Green

101. “Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a while. Including you.
― Unknown

102. “Better see something once than hear about it a thousand times.”  
― Asian Proverb

103. “Ownership of most things is overrated. Ownership of worldly experience is not.”
— Dave Levant

Wanderlust reality quotes

104. “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

105. “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

106. “I was lying to myself when I thought I was lost, I have never been lost – I just wasn’t ready to be found.”
― Nikki Rowe

107. “That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewhere, into our own nowhere.”
― D.H. Lawrence

108. “But wanderlust is like a pretty girl – you wake up one morning, find she’s grown old and decide that either you’re going to commit your life or you’re going to walk away.”
― Charlie LeDuff

109. “We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”
― Kahlil Gibran

110. “How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.”
― Sarah Reijonen

111. “With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding.”
— Sandra Lake

Conclusion

How did you like this list of our favorite wanderlust quotes? Which one did you like the most? Do you think we didn’t mention some cool wanderlust quotes? Let us know in the comments and if you liked this post, also check out this list of the funniest travel quotes and our favorite travel light quotes.

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