Eat croissants in Paris, snack on bugs, learn to cook Greek food, see the Northern Lights, ride a mechanical bull or bungee jump? Most of us have goals and aspirations, things we have always dreamed of doing or hope we could experience in our lifetimes.
Therefore, many of us already have a mental bucket list, just without the formal label. But, what is the true bucket list meaning? How do we define it? Let’s get to the bottom of it.
What is a bucket list? Simply put, it is a collection of goals, dreams and aspirations that you would like to accomplish within your lifetime. The basic meaning of a bucket list is to keep track of your goals and to take steps to achieving these goals in order to maximize the incredible experiences in your life.
Definition from Dictionary.com:
BUCK·ET LIST NOUN, INFORMAL.
1. A LIST OF THINGS A PERSON WANTS TO ACHIEVE OR EXPERIENCE, AS BEFORE REACHING A CERTAIN AGE OR DYING: A BUCKET LIST FOR A TERMINALLY ILL PATIENT.
Bucket List Origin
There is some controversy over where the term bucket list actually originated. It definitely gained popularity after The Bucket List movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman was released in 2007. But, there is evidence that the term was used before that time [and I definitely had my bucket list years before the film’s release date].
The most common explanation for the origin is from the phrase “kick the bucket” which is believed to originate sometime in the Middle Ages when execution by hanging was common and the executioner would “kick the bucket”. You get the idea.
What Goes on a Bucket List?
There is no right or wrong way of designing a bucket list, no one specific prescription. It is a personal journey between you and your aspirations. Each one should be different because it is meant to reflect what you most desire in your own life. For example, mine includes learning to surf, skydiving, and rappelling down a waterfall to appease my adventurous side. If you are not a thrill seeker, your list may be entirely different.
The important part is to come up with items that are meaningful to you; ones that will inspire you to wake up each morning with a fire in your belly. Retiling the bathroom floor has no place on this list, nor does cleaning the cobwebs out of the garage. Save those for your weekly honey-dos. With that said, don’t worry if you didn’t make each aspiration earth shattering, or even travel related; sometimes the simplest goals are the most rewarding.
Giving a blood donation took less than an hour commitment, yet is still one of my most gratifying experiences. Also, don’t exclude anything just because you think it is too difficult or frightening; it is meant to stretch your comfort zone. Do the same for the things you think are too simple. As long as it has meaning to you it should be on your list, because even the smallest achievement can give us the feeling of a great accomplishment.
Don’t Like the Term Bucket List?
Due to the bucket list meaning and definition, some people have some strong emotions about the term, mostly because it is a reminder of their own mortality. But, a bucket list is really about living life to the fullest with all the hours you have left on Earth. With that said, you don’t have to feel obligated to name your list a “bucket list” you can call it anything that makes you feel the warm fuzzies inside. Here are just a few ideas:
- Life List
- Dream List
- Life’s Aspiration List
- My Lifetime Goals
- Things to Achieve in My Lifetime
- My Life’s To Do
- Meaningful Life Goals
- Things to Conquer
- Amazing Experiences To Be Had
- The Life Plan
- My Life’s Must Dos
Related
How to Make a Bucket List: 5 Easy Steps to Create a Great One
10 Incredible Ways a Bucket List Can Improve Your Life
My List: 1000+ Ideas for Your Bucket List
12 Bucket List Goals That Can Actually Save You Money
200 Bucket List Examples: 10,000 Things to do Before You Die
Life List: 100 Amazing Things to Do Before You Die
Couples Bucket List: 68 Fun Activities & Romantic Things to Do
Helpful Resources
My Book: Bucket List Adventures
Whether you are an experienced world traveler or merely just a dreamer with a case of wanderlust, these are the best travel quotes to inspire you. Everything from short to long, to sayings about love, couples, friendship and family. And of course the ever so popular Mark Twain travel quotes! Plus, it just wouldn’t be right for me to not include the top bucket list quotes in the bunch.
Whether they are spoken, or a taken from a book or poem, travel quotes continue to engage our imagination and lift our spirits. They make us re-evaluate our corner of the world, and inspire us to defy our boundaries. Let these quotes on travel inspire you to start packing your bags!
Jump to:
Travel Quotes by Mark Twain
Short Travel Quotes
Funny Travel Quotes
Travel Quotes About Love, Couples & Marriage
Quotes on Travel with Friends
Quotes About Fear & Goals
Bucket List Quotes
Most Inspiring Travel Quotes
Best Travel Quotes by Mark Twain
1. “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
2. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime.” —Mark Twain
3. “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.” —Mark Twain
4. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things 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
5. “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
Top Short Travel Quotes
6. “You lose sight of things…and when you travel everything balances out.”
7. “If not now, when?”
8. “We must travel in the direction of our fear.”
9. “Travelers never think they are the foreigners.” —Mason Cooley
10. “I love places that make you realize how tiny you and your problems are.”
11. “Learn to travel. Travel to learn.”
12. “The journey not the arrival matters.” –T.S. Eliot
13. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” —Lao Tzu
14. “Travel is my therapy.”
15. “Wander often, wonder always.”
16. “Fill your life with adventure, not things.”
17. “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” —Buddha
18. “Don’t listen to what they say. Go see.”
19. “Embrace the detours.” —Kevin Charbonneau
20. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” —Lao Tzu
21. “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” —Yogi Berra
22. “Adventure is out there.”
23. “Jobs fill your pockets, adventure fills your soul.”
24. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” —Susan Sontag
25. “Everyone smiles in the same language.”
26. “Eat well, travel often.”
27. “We wander for distraction but we travel for fulfillment.” —Hillaire Belloc
28. “Put a ding in the universe.” —Steve Jobs
29. “Dream without limits.”
30. “Adventure may hurt you, but monotony will kill you.”
31. “Die with memories, not with dreams.”
32. “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” —Paulo Coelho
33. “Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.” —Ray Bradbury
34. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” —Paul Theroux
35. “Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.” Thomas Fuller
36. “There’s no way I was born to just pay bills and die.”
37. “Travel is an investment in yourself.” —The Cultureur
38. “Let’s wander where the wifi is weak.”
39. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” —Helen Keller
40. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” —Susan Sontag
41. “Design a life you are inspired to live.” —Annette White
42. “Create a life you don’t need a vacation from.”
43. “Work. Save. Travel. Repeat.”
44. “I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.” —Caskie Stinnett
45. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J. R. R. Tolkien
46. “Wherever you go…go with all your heart.” Confucius
47. “I don’t know the question, but travel is definitely the answer.”
Best Funny Travel Quotes
48. “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” —Susan Heller
49. “Jet lag is for amateurs.” —Dick Clark
50. “If you look like your passport photo, you’re too ill to travel.” —Martin Buber
51. “Vacation calories don’t count.”
52. “Now I know why they tell you to put your head between your knees on crash landings. You think you’re going to kiss your ass good-bye.” —Terry Hanson
53. “In America there are two classes of travel – first class, and with children.” —Robert Benchleyl
54. “You want to know what it’s like to be on a plane for 22 hours? Sit in a chair, squeeze your head as hard as you can, don’t stop, then take a paper bag and put it over your mouth and nose and breath your own air over and over and over.” —Lewis Black
55. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” —Rudyard Kipling
56. “Drink heavily with locals whenever possible.” —Anthony Bourdain
57. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” —Dagobert D. Runes
58. “Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.” —Regina Nadelson
59. “One certainty when you travel is the moment you arrive in a foreign country, the American dollar will fall like a stone.” —Erma Bombeck
60. “[Airline food] is the tiniest food I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Any kind of meat that you get — chicken, steak, anything — has grill marks on each side, like somehow we’ll actually believe there’s an open-flame grill in the front of the plane.” —Ellen deGeneres
“Stop making excuses for why you can’t do epic shit
and start making plans for how you can.”
—Annette White
61. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” —Rudyard Kipling,
62. “You can find your way across this country using burger joints the way a navigator uses stars.” —Charles Kuralt
63. “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
64. “If traveling was free, you’d never see me again.”
65. “Airplane travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.” —Al Gore
66. “The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.” —Russel Baker
67. “Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.” —Charles Kuralt
68. “Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” —George Carlin
69. “Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.” —Al Boliska
70. “You define a good flight by negatives: you didn’t get hijacked, you didn’t crash, you didn’t throw up, you weren’t late, you weren’t nauseated by the food. So you are grateful.” —Paul Theroux
71. “There is nothing safer than flying – it’s crashing that is dangerous.” —Theo Cowan
72. “A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.” —Emile Ganest
Travel Quotes About Couples, Love & Marriage
73. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” —John Steinbeck
74. “Happiness is planning a trip to somewhere new, with someone you love.”
75. “I’ve got a crush on the world.”
76. “All you need is love & a passport.”
77. “Relationship status: In a relationship with my passport.”
78. “Actually, the best gift you could have given her was a lifetime of adventures.” —Lewis Carroll
79. “Let’s travel together and get lost in beautiful places.”
80. “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” —Winnie the Pooh
81. “Together is our favorite place to be.”
Quotes on Travel with Friends
82. “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
83. “Life was meant for good friends and great adventures.”
84. “A journey is measured in friends rather than miles.” —Tim Cahill
85. “In life it’s not where you go, it’s who you travel with.”
86. “Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.”—Izaak Walton
87. “Be careful who you make your memories with. Those things can last a lifetime.” —Ugo Eze
88. “I just want to eat good food, make good love, travel near and far, and surround myself with good people who get me. Happiness over everything. Anything less than that is irrelevant.” —Alex Elle
89. “A good friend listens to your adventures. A best friend makes them with you.”
90. “Everyone needs someone who calls and says, “get dressed, we’re going on an adventure.”
91. “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
92. “I want to travel and meet beautiful souls. I want friends in every city.”
Quotes About Fear & Goals
93. “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” —Shirley Maclaine
94. “Never trust your fears, they don’t know your strength.” —Athena Singh
95. “Don’t let fear make your decisions for you.” —Annette White
96. “Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.” —Mark Twain
97. “The toughest challenge may be overcoming the damage our own fears have created.” —Annette White
98. “What if fearful thoughts were a habit like overspending, avoiding eye contact, or saying “umm” when you speak?” —Annette White
99. “To escape fear you have to go through it, not around it.” —Richie Norton
100. “Each time you try something for the first time you will grow—a little piece of the fear of the unknown is removed and replaced with a sense of empowerment.” —Annette White
101. “Fear does not stop death, it stops life.”
102. “Put the fear aside and focus on the endless possibilities the world had to offer.” —Annette White
103. “Instead of listing the thousands of reasons that I can’t do something, I find the half dozen reasons to believe why I can. I find solutions instead of making excuses.” —Annette White
104. “What you are afraid to do is a clear indication of the next thing you need to do.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
105. “Only take advice from someone who has achieved what you desire.” —Annette White
106. “Feel the fear and do it anyway.”
107. “Whatever you have accomplished was because you decided it was a priority in your life and something else was not as important.” —Annette White
108. “Great things never came from comfort zones.”
109. “The key is to make your goals a priority, by eliminating the words “I don’t have time” when referring to them. We all have time for what we choose to have time for and you need to make yourself a priority.” —Annette White
110. “Fear is temporary, regret is forever.”
Bucket List Quotes
111. “The very words “bucket list” can stir up some pretty heavy-duty fears. It can be a reminder of our own mortality, and death is typically something we would rather not think about. But, the reminder that our time is limited is actually one of the best gifts we can be given. It is one that can guide us to achieve what is most important to us before it is too late.” —Annette White
112. “Make a bucket list and fill it with dreams that have no boundaries.” —Annette White
113. “The first thing on my bucket list is to fill the bucket with wine.”
114. “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
115. “For too many people it takes a terrifying illness, hit- ting retirement age, or some other life altering event to honestly begin thinking about the things they want to experience in their lifetime. In many of these cases, it will then be too late to turn these dreams into a reality.” —Annette White
116. “Stop dreaming about your bucket list and start living it.” —Annette White
117. “Whatever you want, there are benefits to turning them into a bucket list, and a well-crafted one can push you to lead your version of an ideal life.” —Annette White
118. “One day your life will flash before your eyes, make sure it’s worth watching.”
119. “It is never too early to begin a bucket list, don’t wait for that someday that may never come.” —Annette White
120. “Facing uncertainties every day and being able to over- come them on my own opened up more possibilities to achieving my bucket list goals.” —Annette White
121. “We live, we die, and the wheels on the bus go round and round.” —The Bucket List Movie
122. “Creating a bucket list is only one small piece of the passionate life puzzle—actually living the bucket list lifestyle is the whole shebang.” —Annette White
123. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” —Walt Disney
Best Inspirational Travel Quotes
124. “Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.” —Mohammed
125. “There’s no time to be bored in a world as beautiful as this.”
126. “We travel not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.”
127. “Be the girl who decided to go for it.”
128. ‘Travel has the ability to enrich your life in some way, shape, or form—you return a different person than when you arrived.” —Annette White
129. “I’d rather have a passport full of stamps, than a house full of stuff.”
130. “You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy a plane ticket.”
131. “I’m no the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” —Mary Anne Radmacher
132. “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
133. “Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.” —Freya Stark
134. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s not worth even beginning if you are only able to make a small start.” —Annette White
135. “Better to see something once than to hear about it hundred times.”
136. “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent in the office or moving your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” ―Jack Kerouac
137. “Discover your passion, then take one step every day to live it.” —Annette White
138. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” —Henry Miller
139. “Stop defining travel by the distance the destination is from your departure or the length of time you will be away from home. Instead characterize it as a journey of exploration, relaxation, adventure, and learning.” —Annette White
140. “I may not be rich, I don’t wear designer clothing or drive a luxury sports car, but bathing elephants in Thailand doesn’t require Louis Vuitton, just a passport and a desire.” —Annette White
141. “It is a big and beautiful world. Most of us live and die in the same corner where we were born and never get to see any of it. I don’t want to be most of us.” —Game of Thrones
142. “Without a plan, aspirations are nothing more than hollow ideas floating around in your head.” —Annette White
143. “We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.” —Carson McCullers
144. “You know all those things you always wanted to do? You should go do them.”
145. “There is a false perception that you need to be rich to travel, which simply is not true.” —Annette White
146. “Do no follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
147. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversations.” —Elizabeth Drew
148. “There are seven days in the week and someday isn’t one of them”
149. “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
150. “Leave the comfort of your resort hotel and be engulfed into the world around you.” —Annette White
151. “You don’t need magic to disappear, all you need is a destination.”
152. “Travel like Gandhi, with simple clothes, open eyes and an uncluttered mind.” —Rick Steves
153. “Travel is still the most intense mode of learning. ” —Kevin Kelly
154. “Of all the books in all the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport”
155. “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” —G.K. Chesterton
156. “I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” —Rosalia de Castro
157. “I always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth. Then I ask myself the same question.” —Harun Yahya
158. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only the first page.” —St. Augustine
159. “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
160. “Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” —Mariam Beard
161. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
162. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” —James Michener
163. “A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” —Moslih Eddin Saadi
164. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” —Martin Buber
165. “The rewards of the journey far outweigh the risk of leaving the harbor.”
166. “Travel leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.” —Ibu Battuta
167. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have in only we seek them with our eyes open.” —Jawaharial Nehru
168. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” —Paul Theroux
169. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” —Anais Nin
170. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
171. “We travel initially to lose ourselves; and we travel next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe where riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and to fall in love once more.” —Pico Iyer
172. “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
173. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” —Freya Stark
174. “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” —Oscar Wilde
175. “We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.” —John Hope Franklin
176. “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
177. “Always there has been an adventure just around the corner–and the world is still full of corners.” —Roy Chapman Andrews
178. “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.” —J.S. Eliot
179. “Life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone…It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn’t it?” —Donald Miller
180. “Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.” —Roman Payne
181. “You don’t choose the day you enter the world and you don’t chose the day you leave. It’s what you do in between that makes all the difference.” —Anita Septimus
182. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” —Lewis Carroll
183. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and lose sight of all that familiar comfort 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.” —Cesare Pavese
184. “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’.” —Hunter S. Thompson
185. “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
186. “If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.” —Rachel Wolchin
187. “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 Ebehardt
188. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” —Aldous Huxley
189. “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to put to rout all that was not life; and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” —Henry David Thoreau
190. “Some people live more in twenty years than others do in forty. It’s not the time, it’s the person.” —Doctor Who
191./ “The road is there, it will always be there. You just have to decide when to take it.” Chris Humphrey
192. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” Benjamin Disraeli
193. “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” —Lawrence Block
194. “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
195. “Live with no excuses, travel with no regrets.”
196. “People don’t take trips, trips take people.”
197. “Those who follow the crowd usually get lost in it.”
198. “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” —Gandhi
199. “Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
200. “You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” —Mae West
For many of these travel quotes, their style, humor and clarity of expression have inspired dreamers, and travelers for generations and continue to comfort kindred spirits today. Read them when you’re stuck in a rut or need to fuel your wanderlust… that is… if it’s possible to add any more fuel to that fire!
Do you have any travel, adventure or bucket list quotes to add to the list?
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