Top 86 Funny Travel Quotes from Famous Travelers

We all know that pictures and words are powerful – as they have the power to elevate perspectives, ignite changes in our lives, and expand our personal space for self-growth.

Traveling can be pretty funny, from dealing with long flights or adjusting to different cultures – but one thing for sure is that humor will help you turn around a bad day.

86 Funny Travel Quotes

Whether you’re planning a trip, recovering from a trip, battling those post-trip blues, or just looking for a little something to boost your life perspective, this collection of funny travel quotes will surely cheer up your day.

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

2. “Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin

3. “The World is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” – Saint Augustine

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

5. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversations.” – Elizabeth Drew

6. “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

7. “The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.” – Russell Baker

8. “You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.” – Yogi Berra

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

10. “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” – Herman Melville

11. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller

12. “The journey not the arrival matters.” – T.S. Eliot

13. “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac

14. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” – Samuel Johnson

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

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

17. “The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes ‘sight-seeing.’” – Daniel J. Boorstin

18. “We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.” – Hilaire Belloc

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

20. “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

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

22. “Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.” – Thomas Fuller

23. “The gladdest moment in human life, I think, is a departure from unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton

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

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

26. “The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” – Henry David Thoreau

27. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” – Helen Keller

28. “We live in a wonderful world that is 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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Telling great stories is what storytellers do; be a traveler and collect stories to share.” – Brahman

32. “People don’t take trips, trips take people.” – John Steinbeck

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

34. “Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” – Susan Sontag

35. “Jobs fill your pocket, but adventures fill your soul.” – Jamie Lyn Beatty

36. “Adventure, yeah. I guess that’s what you call it when everybody comes back alive.” – Mercedes Lackey

37. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that 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

38. “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

39. “The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” – Anna Quindlen

40. “Work, Travel, Save, Repeat.” – Unknown

41. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” – Seneca

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

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

44. “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

45. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” – Clifton Fadiman

46. “Adventure is worthwhile.” – Aristotle

47. “For the born traveler, traveling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim’s time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort.” – Aldous Huxley

48. “Take only memories, leave only footprints.” – Chief Seattle

49. “People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.” – St. Augustine

50. “If you think adventures are dangerous, try routine: it’s Lethal.” – Paul Coelho

51. “Live life with no excuses, travel with no regret.” – Oscar Wilde

52. “There are only four ways to get unraveled; one is to sleep and the other is travel.” – Jim Morrison

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

54. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli

55. “Collect Moments, Not Things.” – Anonymous

56. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

57. “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

58. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

59. “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” – Anonymous

60. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comforts of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things, air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky -all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – CesarePavese

61. “Two roads diverged in a wood and me – I took the one less traveled by.” – Robert Frost

62. “Adventure is a path. The real adventure, self-determined, self-motivated, often risky, forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world.” – Mark Jenkins

63. “Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.” – Irving Wallace

64. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” – Anais Nin

65. “He who would travel happily must travel light.” – Antoine de St. Exupery

66. “The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.” – Alain de Botton

67. “We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.” – Ray Bradbury

68. “Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel’s immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way.” – Ralph Crawshaw

69. “No matter where you go, there you are.” – Buckaroo Banzai

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

71. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” – Tim Cahill

72. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” – Roy M. Goodman

73. “Wherever you go, go with all your heart!” – Confucius

74. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” – John Steinbeck

75. “I love to travel, but hate to arrive.” – Albert Einstein

76. “Travelling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’” – Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

77. “To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.” – Charles Horton Cooley

78. “Travel teaches toleration.” – Benjamin Disraeli

79. “A person susceptible to “wanderlust” is not so much addicted to movement as committed to transformation.” – Pico Iyer

80. “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

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

82. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” – Freya Stark

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

84. “Own only what you can always carry with you: known languages, known countries, known people. Let your memory be your travel bag.” – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

85. “Traveling’s not something you’re good at. It’s something you do. Like Breathing.” – Gayle Foreman

86. “To Travel is to Live.” – Hans Christian Andersen

Conclusion

Let’s face it, as travelers, we want to be adventurers.

We follow the pursuit of freedom and we all dream of the perfect backpacking trip. We believe that winging it is the way to go and we have wide-eyed faith that following the spur of the moment is the only way to guarantee that we will make the most of our experience.

I hope these travel quotes will help you keep focused, find the true happiness in life, put a smile on your face, or just give you some extra positive energy whether you are right now hitting the road or wishing you would.