Travel Quotes

There are many reasons why we travel, and travel fulfills different needs for different folks. Here we post observations people have made about how travel is meaningful to them or to others, followed by quotes relating to specific destinations.

We invite you to submit your favorites. Whatever your travel longing, our travel experts will help you fulfill it. We invite you to read our "Why Buy From Us?" information.

On Travel:

Does tourism promote cultural understanding? "It's alarming how much misinformation is out there. Travel is a powerful antidote. When people meet, share a coffee, and talk about their country or their experience, differences often melt away. Tourists are the best ambassadors for tolerance. Every holiday snap, every e-mail home, turns them into digital diplomats. There is no doubt in my mind that travel fosters tolerance, promotes knowledge, and encourages harmony between people of different cultures and religions."
Queen Rania

"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

"He who does not travel does not know the value of men."
Islamic Proverb

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
Robert Louis Stevenson

"To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted."
Bill Bryson

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."
Susan Sontag

"I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within."
Lillian Smith

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."
Mark Twain

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
Lao Tzu

"I never get tired of traveling -- I'm always learning something new."
Bill Clinton, April, 2007

"When you travel, you get close to people and they are no longer statistics."
Bill Drayton, Ashoka Founder

"People are very stressed. They have very busy lives. Vacations are an important way of finding meaning in life. They enhance the quality of life, including health."
Yoshi Iwasaki, Temple University

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

"Travel really is our last best hope. It unites more than it divides. It builds more than it destroys. And perhaps most importantly, it gives us almost unlimited options in our personal and professional lives. Travel is a special gift we give to ourselves and hopefully, others. It is more than just freedom. It perpetuates freedom. Travel catapults you to the threshold of a dream and beyond."
Peter Greenberg

"The world is but a canvas to the imagination."
Henry David Thoreau

"We do not take a trip. A trip takes us."
John Steinbeck

"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
John Steinbeck

"My favorite thing is to go where I've never been."
Diane Arbus

"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
Aldous Huxley

"We too can be pioneers. Not by opening up vast new geographic frontiers, but rather, by finding more thoughtful ways to approach those already discovered."
Sven-Olaf Lindblad

"Studies show that when you go on vacation, your performance increases when you go back to the job."
Joe Robinson, Work to Live

"Women who took a vacation only once in six years were twice as likely to report high rates of tension, depression, and anxiety as women who took vacations two or more times each year."
Catherine McCarty, Marshfield Clinic Study

"This is what's priceless about travel: It allows us to fill in the blanks, put names to faces, and make bits and pieces of the wide world, now and forever, part of our own worlds. And through it, we gain a better understanding of everything from the front-page news to our next-door neighbors."
Thomas Swick, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

"To get inside a culture, you've got to not only know a place as a physical space but also get inside the people's minds. Traveling gives you that kind of insight. You can't just trust the values you carry around - you realize that someone else might have a completely different way of doing something."
Yo-Yo Ma

Is there a common language, other than music?
"Absolutely. There is the language of hospitality, a secular sense of honoring one another. We can meet as strangers, but we can share respect and dignity."
Yo-Yo Ma

"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
Robert Louis Stevenson

"One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things."
Henry Miller

Africa:
" No matter how much one has read about Africa beforehand, one's first impressions from actually being there are overwhelming."
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

"All I wanted to do now was get back to Africa. We had not left it, yet, but when I would wake in the night I would lie listening, homesick for it already."
Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa

Cambodia/Angkor:
"We stand before it stunned. It is like nothing else in the world."
H. Churchill Candee, Angkor: The Magnificent, The wonder City of Ancient Cambodia

New Zealand: