45 Best Inspirational Travel Quotes For Your Instagram Caption

After posting your 100th impeccable travel shot, coming up with an equally as engaging Instagram caption can be hard. From what I’ve heard, it’s something many fellow content creators struggle with. Luckily, there’s a simple solution: travel quotes!

I love using inspirational travel quotes for my Instagram caption, because it’s fairly low effort, but still more meaningful than your typical sun/wave emoji (let’s be honest, we’ve all used those one too many times…). For this post, I want to share some of my favourite travel quotes that never fail to inspire a sense of adventure, freedom and wanderlust.

Read next: 11 Life Lessons I’ve Learned From Travelling The World

SHORT TRAVEL QUOTES

Though I usually like to write obnoxiously long captions on Instagram, sometimes I just can’t be bothered (IG can be a lot to keep up with, hence the prolonged hiatus… *sorry not sorry*). This is when I will opt for a short saying that is thought-provoking yet NOT time consuming (talk about a win-win). I know lots of people actually prefer short travel quotes for Instagram, so if that’s you, this is your list!

1. “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” ― Stephen Covey

2. “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” — Paulo Coelho⁣

3. “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” ― Jack Kerouac

4. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”

― David Mitchell

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

6. “I don’t know where I’m going, but I promise it won’t be boring.” ― David Bowie

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

8. “A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for” ― John A. Shedd

9. “Investment in travel is an investment in yourself.”

― Matthew Karsten

10. “Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing” ― Barry Finlay

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

DEEP TRAVEL QUOTES

I feel like a lot of people are afraid to be “too deep” on Instagram, but I’ve found that it’s a lot easier for people to comment and get involved if you make them reflect on something. I love posting deep quotes and encouraging my followers to share their opinion!

12. “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

13. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions” ― Oliver Wendell Holmes

14. “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 cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” ― Mark Twain

16. “Once you realize that the road is the goal and that you are always on the road, not to reach a goal, but to enjoy its beauty and its wisdom, life ceases to be a task and becomes natural and simple, in itself an ecstasy.” ― Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

17. “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

18. “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to” ― Alan Keightley

19. “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, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” ― Cesare Pavese

20. “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

21. “Though we travel the world over to find the beauty we must carry it with us or we find it not.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

ADVENTURE TRAVEL QUOTES

Travel and adventure obviously go hand in hand, but some types of travel are definitely more adventurous than others. These travel quotes are perfect for hikers, backpackers, solo travellers or anyone who’s a lover of the adventurous travel lifestyle.

22. “If happiness is the goal – and it should be, then adventure should be top priority.” ― Richard Branson

23. “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it’s lethal” ― Paulo Coelho

25. “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

26. “I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.” — Storm Jameson

27. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” ― Mark Jenkins

28. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see” ― Gilbert K. Chesterton

29. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” ― J.R.R. Tolkien

30. “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

MOTIVATIONAL TRAVEL QUOTES

My favourite quotes are those that inspire and motivate us to live our best, most authentic lives. Sometimes, the final push to get out of your comfort zone can come in the form of a few simple words of wisdom. Words make you feel things, and feelings can quickly turn into action. Here are some of the best motivational travel quotes:

31. “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

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

34. “I stopped telling myself that I’m lost. I’m not. I’m on a road with no destination, I’m just driving with hope that I’ll find a place that I like and I’ll stay there. I’m not lost, I’m on my way.” ― Ahunnaya

35. “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” ― Jack Kerouac

36. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ― Mark Twain

37. “And the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

LOVE TRAVEL QUOTES

I wanted to include a list of quotes on travel and love, since many travellers not only want to express their love for travel, but for each other. I’ve found a few romantic travel quotes for all of you travel couples out there, as well as some travel quotes about friendship.

38. “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” ― Shirley MacLaine

39. “The travel impulse is mental and physical curiosity. It’s a passion. And I can’t understand people who don’t want to travel.” — Paul Theroux

40. “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

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

43. “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 Lyer

44. “I’ve fallen in love with adventures, so I begin to wonder, if that’s why I’ve fallen for you.” ― E. Grin

45. “In life, it’s not where you go, It’s who you travel with.” ― Charles Schulz

I hope this list of inspirational travel quotes gave you some ideas on what to write in your Instagram caption. I will be adding more quotes whenever I find one that I like, so feel free to subscribe if you want to stay updated 🙂

What’s your favourite travel quote of all time? Let me know in the comments!