Great quotes about travel and life to get you motivated…

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“Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” – Seth Godin

“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

“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin

“Realize that sleeping on a futon when you’re 30 is not the worst thing. You know what’s worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you’re not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate. You’ll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There’s no risk when you go after a dream. There’s a tremendous amount of risk to playing it safe.” – Bill Burr

“When you stop doing things for fun you might as well be dead.” – Ernest Hemingway

“One of the best things about leaving the United States is being addressed like an adult. Once overseas, the haughty demeanor, simpleton instructions, nursery-school tenor, and scripted happy talk that exemplify the American travel industry’s idea of “service” – the pinnacle of infantilism – are replaced by straight forward, competent voices delivering information in a crisp, capable manner. I love England because it’s like a grown up America, a fact I’m reminded of as soon as I get on a British Airways flight or hop onto a london cab and people stop treating me as though I’d just learned to finger paint.” – Chuck Thompson (Smile When You’re Lying)

 “There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything.” – James Hilton (Lost Horizon)

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” – Mae West

 “Are there truly happy places? I tend to think that happiness is a particular time in a particular place, an epiphany that remains as a consolation and a regret. Fogies recall many a happy time, because fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem.” – Paul Theroux (The Tao Of Travel)

 “I am not going for the sake of impressions or observations, but simply for the sake of living for six months differently form how I have lived hitherto.” – Anton Chekhov (Writing to a friend about his impending trip to Siberia 1889)

 “There is no routine in travel, only early starts and insults, and if there is a rhythm, it is a rhythm of disruptions and shocks and uncertainty.” – Paul Theroux (The Last Train To Zona Verde)

 “If the internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay at home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before: to look closer, to dig deeper, to sort the authentic from the fake; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear, and sometimes – importantly – to suffer the effects of this curiosity.” – Paul Theroux (The Last Train To Zona Verde)

“Live your life, take chances, be crazy. Don’t hesitate because right now is the oldest you’ve ever been and the youngest you’ll ever be again.” – Unknown

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

“If I’d learned one thing from traveling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don’t talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.” – Alex Garland (The Beach)

 “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 can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” – Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad)

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

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

 “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

 “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.” – Jim Carrey

 “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

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

 “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien

 “Brave men can live well anywhere. A coward dreads all things.” – Elder Edda (Norse mythology)

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu

 “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson (Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes)

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

 “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 (The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt)

 “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” – Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

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

 “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” – George Harrison

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

 “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.” – Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer Abroad)

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

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

 “But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. 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 (Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe)

 “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” – Judith Thurman

 “To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Andersen (The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography)

 “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life” – Jack Kerouac (On the Road)

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

 “There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina’s first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.” – Audrey Niffenegger (Her Fearful Symmetry)

 “The journey itself is my home.” – Bashō Matsuo

 “Going to a lot of places doesn’t shorten the list of things you want to do, it only lengthens it” – Brook Silva-Braga (A Map For Saturday)

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” – Henry David Thoreau

“Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or a foreign culture. It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place. Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life, or seeing clearly a serious mistake. But this does not happen to the exclusion of the exotic present. What makes the whole experience vivid, and sometimes thrilling, is the juxtaposition of the present and the past.”– Paul Theroux (The Happy Isles of Oceania)

“Travel while you’re young and able. Don’t worry about the money, just make it work. Experience is far more valuable than money will ever be.”

“We travel, some of us, to slip through the curtain of the ordinary, and into the presence of whatever lies just outside our apprehension.” – Pico Iyer (Sun After Dark)

“You don’t choose a life…you live one” – Emilio Estevez (The Way)

“Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” – Naguib Mahfouz