There is just something about a road trip that evokes a sense of adventure and excitement like no other trip. While all travel is awesome and fulfilling, having the ability to go wherever you want and stop whenever you want gives you a sense of freedom and ownership of the trip.
You also get to plan the trip exactly to your wishes and the planning sessions raise the excitement levels more and more as the trip gets closer. No matter if it’s a long stretch on the road or a short few days, nothing beats the freedom of the open road.
Check out the following inspirational road trip quotes and captions of some famous travellers and road-trippers to inspire you to plan your next adventure. Once you’re full of inspiration and ready to go then click through to check out some of the epic road-trip itineraries on this site!
Whether you’re seeking the perfect road trip Instagram caption or just looking to fuel your wanderlust with some classic quotes about road trips, we’ve got you covered!
Road Trip Quotes by Jack Kerouac
I had to start with a whole section dedicated to this man. ‘On The Road’ and ‘The Dharma Bums’ were two of the first books I read when the seed of travel was beginning to grow in my mind. I believe they are some of the best travel writing there is; Kerouac inspired my travels and the name of this blog, hopefully his words can continue to send more and more people on their own epic journeys.
1: “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.” – Jack Kerouac
2: “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac
3: “All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.” – Jack Kerouac
4: “The road must eventually lead to the whole world.” – Jack Kerouac
5: “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
6:“Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars…” – Jack Kerouac
7: “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
More Awesome Road Trip Quotes
8: “I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for travelling?” – Freya Stark
9: “I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.” – Paulo Coelho
10: “Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.” – Freya Stark
11: “I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
12: “The gladdest moment in human life, me thinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton
13: “You know more of a road by having travelled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.” – William Hazlitt
14: “The journey is part of the experience – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.” – Anthony Bourdain
15: “Happiness is planning a trip somewhere new with someone you love.” – Saadiyat Rotana
16: “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 Andersen
17: “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
18: “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” – John Steinbeck
19: “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
20: “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it’s lethal.” – Paulo Coelho
21: “I take to the open road, healthy, free, the world before me.” – Walt Whitman
22: “One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
23: “Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.” – Erol Ozan
24: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T.S. Eliot
25: “What it takes to realize everything is fine around you? A road trip to the mountains where your soul dwells in the echoes of the winds that carry fragments of clouds with them. What it takes to realize world is going back to chaos and infinite hurry? End of the aforementioned road trip.” – Crestless Wave
26: “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
27: “You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.” – Paul Theroux
28: “Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.” – Confucius
29: “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” – Anita Desai
30: “I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw the sense of time out the window.” – Miriam Toews
31: “The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.” – Aaron Lauritsen
32: “You can be writing every day. When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.” – Steve Rushin
33: “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” – Buddha
34: “The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” – William Least Heat Moon
35: “Sometimes the road less travelled is less travelled for a reason.” – Jerry Seinfeld
37: “No road is long with good company.” – Turkish Proverb
38: “I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.” – Eric Roth
39: “Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of traveling.” – Margaret Lee Runbeck
40: “There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.” – Bill Bryson
41: “Because the greatest part of a road trip isn’t arriving at your destination. It’s all the wild stuff that happens along the way.” – Emma Chase
42: “To the tourist, travel is a means to an end; to the traveller, it’s an end in itself.” – Marty Rubin
43: “Travel is the only thing we buy that makes us richer.” – Unknown
44: “Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” – T.S. Eliot
45: “Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.” – Elizabeth Berg
47: “If you’re not lost, you’re not much of an explorer.” – John Perry Barlow
48: “I don’t know where I’m going from here but I promise it won’t be boring.” – David Bowie
49: “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware.” – Martin Buber
50: “You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” – Miriam Adeney
52: “Once you have travelled, 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
53: “And just like that, we’re on our way to everywhere.” – Emery Lord
54: “Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.” – Izaak Walton
55: “Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.” – Bob Bitchin
57: “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” – Freya Stark
58: “No one you have been and no place you have gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride. The success of your journey and your destination all depends on who’s driving.” – Bruce Springsteen
59: “I wonder why it is that when I plan a route too carefully, it goes to pieces, whereas if I blunder along in blissful ignorance aimed in a fancied direction I get through with no trouble.” – John Steinbeck
60: “Sometimes the most scenic roads in life are the detours you didn’t mean to take.” – Angela N. Blount
61: “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” – Helen Keller
62: “An adventure is never an adventure when it happens. An adventure is simply physical and emotional discomfort recollected in tranquility.” – Tim Cahill
63: “Take a detour. Discover small towns and friendly faces that don’t grow along the highway.” – Khang Kijarro Nguyen
64: “Behold the azure sea in front of you, the turquoise sky above you, the amber mountain beneath your feet, and the golden daisy in your hands. How are you not the richest person on earth?” – Khang Kijarro Nguyen
65: “The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.” – Paul Theroux
66: “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.” – Stephen Covey
67: “The concept of time, as it’s commonly understood by normal people with normal jobs and normal goddamn lives, doesn’t exist on the road. The nights spread out like the dark, godforsaken highways that distinguish them, and the days run together like Thanksgiving dinner smothered in gravy. You never really know where you are or what time it is, and the outside world starts to fade away. It’s cool.” – Tiffanie DeBartolo
We hope you’re feeling inspired and ready to hit the road! Let us know in the comments which of these road trip quotes is your favourite or if there are any epic quotes that we have missed in this list 🙂 Happy road tripping!
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What an excellent collection of travel quotes! Many of these I haven’t read before which was surprising. So many sites of travel quotes pretty much have the same ones, so well done for uncovering these ones!