168 Of The Best Inspirational Quotes In The World
Are you looking for a little inspiration?
It’s amazing how a few well-combined words can change your mood, realign your goals,
or inspire you to take a risk on that thing you’ve always dreamed of.
This collection of quotes is divided into The Best Travel Quotes, The Best Quotes to Inspire Adventure, The Best Paulo Coelho Quotes, The Best Inspirational Quotes About Life, and The Best Quotes to Inspire Creativity.
With 168 quotes by authors, travelers, adventurers, artists, thinkers, creators, and more, you are sure to find something on this page that will inspire you.
The Best Travel Quotes
"People travel to far away places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home"
—Dagobert D. Runes
“Never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite and never outstay your welcome. Keep your mind open and suck in every experience. And if it hurts you know what? It’s probably worth it.”
—Richard from the movie The Beach
“Travel is rebellion in its purest form. We follow our heart. We free ourselves of labels. We lose control willingly. We trade a role for reality. We love the unfamiliar. We trust strangers. We own only what we can carry. We search for better questions, not answers. We truly graduate. We, sometimes, choose never to come back.”
—Author Unknown
“The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them”
—Amelia E. Barr
“If you look like your passport photo, you probably need the trip.”
—Unknown
“Go where you feel most alive.”
—Unknown
“We travel because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something inside our minds has changed, and that changes everything.”
—Jonah Lehrer
“Twenty years from now you will 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 harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
—Mark Twain
“We travel not to escape life, but for life to not escape us.”
—Anonymous
“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 Anderson
“Good things come to those who book flights.”
— Unknown
“One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are”
—Edith Wharton
“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
“Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.”
—Unknown
"And if travel is like love, it is, in the end, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end."
—Pico Iyer
"I travel a lot: I hate having my life disrupted by routine."
—Caskie Stinnett
"Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times."
—Asian Proverb
"At the end of the day, your feet should be dirty, your hair should be messy and your eyes sparkling."
—Shanti
"Live, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry."
—Jack Kerouac
"Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands."
—Hannah Arendt
"Travelling is about finding those things that you never knew you were looking for."
—Unknown
“After all, one travels in order for things to happen and change; otherwise you might as well stay at home.”
—Nicolas Bouvier
“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”
—Mary Anne Radmacher
"I would rather own a little and see the world than own the world and see a little."
—Alexander Sattler
"I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question."
—Harun Yahya
"Don't tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you've traveled."
—Mohammed
"So much of who we are is where we have been."
—William Langewiesche
“All you need is a passport”
—Unknown
"To understand what’s going on in the world, you have to see the world."
—Aerin Lauder
“All you’ve got to do is decide to go and the hardest part is over. So go!”
— Tony Wheeler, Cofounder of “Lonely Planet”
"The answer to the world’s problems today is not to turn inward. We simply have to seize every opportunity to promote understanding between countries and across cultures. And there’s no better way to do that than to explore the world with an open mind, a sturdy carry-on, and clothes that don’t wrinkle."
—Madeleine Albright
"Surely of all the wonders in the world, the horizon is the greatest."
—Freya Stark
"We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, we travel to be lost."
—Ray Bradbury
"People don’t take trips, trips take people."
—John Steinbeck
"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
"I travel because I’d rather look back at my life saying ‘I can’t believe I did that’ instead of ‘If only I had…’"
—Florine Bos
“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life (and travel) leaves marks on you.”
— Anthony Bourdain
"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
"The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends."
—Shirley MacLaine
"One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are."
—Edith Wharton
"Solo travel not only pushes you out of your comfort zone, it also pushes you out of the zone of others’ expectations."
—Suzy Strutner
"I travel because seeing photos in books and brochures wasn’t good enough for me. To be there, that was everything."
—Wiremu Ratcliffe
"Travel today is ticking things off: ‘Whew, I’ve done Machu Picchu, now I can get drunk.’ It used to take three weeks to get people in the right frame of mind, to un-brainwash them. Now it would take three months to get people’s heads straightened out… It’s a real problem now—people don’t know how to enjoy life. They want hedonism, short-term thrills."
—from “Chapter 28: When It Rains” in Turn Right At Machu Picchu by Mark Adams
"Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage."
—T.S. Eliot
“Though I often looked for one, I finally had to admit that there could be no cure for Paris.”
— Paula McLain, "The Paris Wife"
“There’s only four ways to get unraveled; one is to sleep and the other is travel.”
— Jim Morrison
"To travel is to live."
—Hans Christian Anderson
"Not I, not anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself."
—Walt Whitman
“I followed my heart and it led to the airport.”
—Unknown
“Travel is an investment in yourself.”
—Unknown
“Yeah, working is great. But have you tried traveling?”
—Unknown
“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
“You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it’s a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe out what came before.”
— from The Last Little Blue Envelope by Maureen Johnson
“I need to move around a bit. To shuffle my surroundings. To wake up in cities I don’t know my way around and have conversations in languages I cannot entirely comprehend. There is always this tremendous longing in my heart to be lost, to be someplace else, to be far far away from all of this.”
— Beau Taplin
"I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine."
—Caskie Stinnett
"I travel because I become uncomfortable being too comfortable."
—Carew Papritz
"Nothing adventured, nothing attained."
—Peter McWilliams
"You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you’ll not only miss the people you love, but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you’ll never be this way ever again."
—Azar Nafasi
"Leave every place you go, everything you touch, a little better for your having been there."
—Julie Andrews
"There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it."
—Charles Dudley Warner
“If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet, he said.”
—Rachel Wolchin
"I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad."
—George Bernard Shaw
"A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you can control it."
—John Steinbeck
"The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it."
—Rudyard Kipling
“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
“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
“Travel is rebellion in its purest form. We follow our heart. We free ourselves of labels. We lose control willingly. We trade a role for reality. We love the unfamiliar. We trust strangers. We own only what we can carry. We search for better questions, not answers. We truly graduate. We, sometimes, choose never to come back.”
—Author Unknown
“Travel often; getting lost will help you find yourself.”
—The Holstee Manifesto
“Among travelers, talking about the past usually meant talking about the just passed. The expiration date on old experiences came quickly. What mattered most was where you were going next.”
— from A House in The Sky by Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett
“The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them”
—Amelia E. Barr
“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples 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
“Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before”
—Dalai Lama
“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
“I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, newborn baby — I just don’t care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it’s mine. Because it looks exactly like me. It can barf all over me if it wants to — I just don’t care.”
— Elizabeth Gilbert, from Eat.Pray.Love
"Not all those who wander are lost"
—J.R.R. Tolkien
"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect"
—Paul Theroux
"Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen"
—Benjamin Disraeli
"To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world”
—Freya Stark
"A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving"
—Lao Tzu
“Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.”
— Ernest Hemingway
“A map is the greatest of all epic poems. Its lines and colors show the realization of great dreams.”
— Gilbert H. Grosvenor, National Geographic Magazine Editor 1914
“We travel because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something inside our minds has changed, and that changes everything.”
— Jonah Lehrer
“You can never visit the same place twice. Each time, it’s a different story. By the very act of coming back, you wipe out what came before.”
— from The Last Little Blue Envelope by Maureen Johnson
“May you never be too busy to stop and breathe under a palm tree.”
— Unknown
“Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.”
— Michael Palin
Quotes to Inspire Adventure
"A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step"—Lao Tzu“I like things to happen. And if they don’t happen, I like to make them happen.”
—Winston Churchill
“Some things aren’t meant to be tamed. For example, YOU.”
—Unknown
“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
—Amelia Earhart
“It’s bad manners to keep an adventure waiting.”
—Unknown
"Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures."
—Lovelle Drachman
“Fill your life with adventures, not things. Have stories to tell, not stuff to show.”
—Unknown
“If adventures do not befall a lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
— Jane Austin
"If it’s both terrifying and amazing then you should definitely pursue it."
—Erada
“NOW is the right time for a new adventure.”
—Unknown
"Jobs fill your pocket, adventures fill your soul."
—Jamie Lyn Beatty
"If at some point you don't ask yourself 'What have I gotten myself into?' then you're not doing it right"
—Roland Gau
“Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
— Amelia Earhart
“Anything that gets the blood racing is probably worth doing.”
—Hunter S. Thompson
The Best Paulo Coelho Quotes
"And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it."
—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
“If I had to give you one piece of advice, it would be this: don’t be intimidated by other people’s opinions. Only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risks and do what you really want to do. Seek out people who aren’t afraid of making mistakes and who, therefore, do make mistakes. Because of that, their work often isn’t recognized, but they are precisely the kind of people who change the world.”
—Paulo Coelho, Aleph
"They live as if they were never going to die, and die as if they had never lived."
—Paulo Coelho, What is Funny About Man
"People are capable, at any time in their lives, of doing what they dream of."
—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"...braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear."
—Paulo Coelho, The Spy
"Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure."
—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"Travel is never a matter of money but of courage."
—Paulo Coelho
“But I am a born pilgrim. Even when I am feeling really lazy or I’m missing home, I need take only one step to be carried away by the excitement of the journey... I realize that I will never reach my goal by staying in the same place all the time. I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads. ”
—Paulo Coelho, Aleph
"Whoever you are, or whatever it is that you do, when you really want something, it's because that desire originated in the soul of the universe. It's your mission on earth."
—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"All you have to do is pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step."
—Paulo Coelho, The Zahir
“The boy knew a lot of people in the city. That was what made traveling appeal to him — he always made new friends, and he didn’t need to spend all of his time with them [to keep them]”
—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"The ship is safest when it is in port, but that is not what ships were built for."
—Paulo Coelho, The Pilgrimage
"It is the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting."
—Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
"The danger of an adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort."
—Paulo Coelho, Veronika Decides to Die
"Never allow waiting to become a habit. Live your dreams and take risks. Life is happening now."
—Paulo Coelho
The Best Inspirational Quotes About Life
“Don’t quit your daydream”
—Unknown
“If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.”
—Seth Godin
“Above all, try something.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The cost of not following your dream, your heart, or your gut, is spending the rest of your life wishing that you had.”
—Unknown
"Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin."
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes
“The Bhagavad Gita—that ancient Indian Yogic text—says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert from Eat, Prey, Love
"The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself."
—Wallace Stevens
"May you live all the days of your life."
—Jonathan Swift
"Be careful who you make memories with. Those things can last a lifetime."
—Ugo Eze
"The earth has music for those who listen."
—Shakespeare
“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.”
—Unknown
“I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people who have a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of, and if you’re not, I hope you have the courage to start all over again.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone elses life. ”
— Steve Jobs, 2005
"No one looks stupid when they’re having fun."
—Amy Poehler
"Do more things that make you forget to check your phone."
—Unknown
“I would rather die of passion than of boredom.”
—Vincent van Gogh
“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you”
—Frida Kahlo
“It is okay to live a life that others do not understand.”
—Unknown
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”
—Kurt Vonnegut from Mother Night, 1961
“You weren’t born to just pay bills and die.”
—Unknown
“It is a terrible thing, I think, in life to wait until you’re ready. I have this feeling now that actually no one is ever ready to do anything. There is almost no such thing as ready. There is only now. And you may as well do it now. Generally speaking, now is as good a time as any.”
—Hugh Laurie
“If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.”
—Fay Weldon
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not leave you astray ”
—Rumi
“Surround yourself with people who get it.”
— Unknown
“Coming back to where you started is not the same as not leaving.”
—Terry Pratchett
“Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.”
—Unknown
“I don’t want to earn my living; I want to live.”
—Oscar Wilde
“Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.”
—from The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
“There’s no time to be bored in a world as beautiful as this.”
—Unknown
“I want to be around people that do things. I don’t want to be around people anymore that judge or talk about what people do. I want to be around people that dream and support and do things.”
—Amy Poehler
“The only think you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.”
—Albert Einstein
“I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life — and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”
— Georgia O'Keeffe
“Although no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.”
—Carl Bard
“Twenty years from now you will 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 harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
—Mark Twain
“Some things weren’t meant to be tamed. For example, YOU.”
— Unknown
“I decided, very early on, just to accept life unconditionally; I never expected it to do anything special for me, yet I seemed to accomplish far more than I had ever hoped. Most of the time it just happened to me without me ever seeking it.”
— Audrey Hepburn
“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at all my life and never seen.”
— John Steinbeck
“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
— Ernest Hemingway
The Best Quotes To Inspire Creativity
“I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things that I’m afraid of.”
—Joss Whedon
“Creativity is not a competition.”
—Autumn Sky Hall
“If you are willing to do something that might not work, you’re closer to being an artist”
—Seth Godin
“To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”
—Joseph Chilton Pearce
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people that are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones that do.”
—Steve Jobs
“Don’t wait until you know who you are to get started”
—from Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon
“It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.”
— Oscar Wilde
“Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we’re about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what’s going on when nobody’s looking.”
—Tom Miller
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, dreams, conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent”
—Jim Jarmusch
"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable"
—Cesar Cruz
“Self-doubt can be an ally. This is because it serves as an indicator of aspiration. It reflects love, love of something we dream of doing, and desire, desire to do it. If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), “Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?” chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”
—Steven Pressfield from The War of Art
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art."
—Andy Warhol
“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering — these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love — these are what we stay alive for.”
— Robin Williams
“My head is a hive of words that won’t settle.”
— Virginia Woolf
“As a writer, if someone falls in love with my work, I know they have fallen in love with my mind. Having no idea what my face looks like, they chose my mind.”
— Nayyirah Waheed
“The writer can grow as a person or he can shrink. His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavour, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”
— Norman Mailer
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing”
—Ben Franklin
