30 Best Wanderlust Quotes to Inspire You

A person walking in an open valley with crazy weather and a yellow rectangle with the words "30 best wanderlust quotes to inspire you"
A strong desire to travel.
A strong, innate desire to rove or travel about.
The wish to travel far away and to many different places.
However you personally define wanderlust, one thing's for certain: it has many of the same benefits as actually physically traveling.
That's right – just thinking about traveling (and planning travel, of course!) offers numerous mental health benefits, acting as a mini vacay for the mind. 

So go ahead, let your mind "wander." Whether you're looking for the perfect social media caption, a few nature-focused words to include with an outdoorsy gift, or just something to inspire your next adventure, here are 30 of the best wanderlust quotes. 

Actually, one quick thing before we get into the quotes about wanderlust! Have you checked out our extensive collection of Travel Tokens? With countries, US states, landmarks, sports stadiums, military bases, national parks, and so many other options, they go hand-in-hand with wanderlust!

Collect tokens for all the places you've traveled or create a wearable vision board with all the places you hope to go. Either way, you can even have them customized with a date or initials!

30 of the Best Wanderlust Quotes

A road with a quote from Anatole France overlaid on top of it, one of the best wanderlust quotes

General Quotes About Wanderlust

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

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

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

4. “Adventure is worthwhile.” – Aesop

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

6. “Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.” – actress Lovelle Drachman

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

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

9. “There are far better things ahead than the ones we leave behind.” C.S. Lewis

10. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson

11. “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.” – author Jawaharlal Nehru

12. “Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more that what we could learn from books.” – philanthropist John Lubbock

13. “The world is full of wonderful things you haven’t seen yet. Don’t ever give up on the chance of seeing them.” — J.K. Rowling

14. “The key to a wonderful life is to never stop wandering into wonder.” – writer and philosopher Suzy Kassem

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

The Blue Ridge Mountains at sunset with one of the best wanderlust quotes over the top, from Enos Mills

Best Wanderlust Quotes About National Parks

16. “There is nothing so American as our national parks…The fundamental idea behind the parks… is that the country belongs to the people, that it is in process of making for the enrichment of the lives of all of us.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

17. “Within National Parks is room — glorious room — room in which to find ourselves, in which to think and hope, to dream and plan, to rest and resolve.”
naturalist Enos Mills

18. “The National Parks are the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape.” filmmaker Ken Burns

19. “I knew my destiny when I first experienced Yosemite.” Ansel Adams

20. "National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst." – American novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner

One of the best wanderlust quotes, written over a canyon with water and rocks in the bottom

Best Wanderlust Quotes About Water

21. “Water is the driving force of all nature.” – Leonardo da Vinci

22. “Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.” – author A. A. Milne

23. “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” — natural science writer and anthropologist Loren Eiseley

24. “Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.” — Lao Tzu

25. “A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.” Henry David Thoreau

A quote from Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the best wanderlust quotes out there

Best Wanderlust Quotes About Mountains

26. “It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” – mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first people to ever summit Mount Everest!

27. "Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity."  John Muir

28. “Mountains are not stadiums where I satisfy my ambition to achieve, they are the cathedrals where I practice my religion.” – mountaineer Anatoli Boukreev (who, by the way, successfully summited 10 of the world's 14 mountain peaks above 8,000 meters - 26,000 feet!)

29. “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

30. “He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragedies, real or imaginary.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

Well friends, there you have it – 30 awesome, inspirational wanderlust quotes. Which ones are your favorite and which ones are totally new to you? Happy adventuring out there, and stay safe!

4 comments

Thank you for the great quotes. They help to inspire me as I ready for my next trip. But, you do owe us one more quote as 2 & 15 are the same. :)

Mike DeMarco December 07, 2022

Having just returned from Antarctica and already planning my next two travel adventures, thank you for sharing these beautiful quotes. They did my wandering heart good.

Carol Basile December 04, 2022

Thank you for the lovey and inspirational quotes as it was a great way to start my Sunday morning.

Dawn December 04, 2022

Thank you for sharing the 30 quotes. It was like a breath of fresh air to read through them!

Leia Burzynski December 04, 2022

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