Travel quotes travel too, and many of them pick up the wrong name along the way. Here are eleven of the best-loved lines about wandering, from Tolkien and Robert Frost to Laozi and Ursula K. Le Guin, each with the book or poem it comes from and the story behind it, so you know exactly what you are pinning to your wall.

Quote card: The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page, over a street with washing lines
Quote cards: Wordables.

Classic travel quotes from literature

Quote card: Not all those who wander are lost – J.R.R. Tolkien, over snowy mountains

1. “Not all those who wander are lost.” – J.R.R. Tolkien. The line comes from “The Riddle of Strider”, the poem that begins “All that is gold does not glitter”, in Book 1, Chapter 10 of The Fellowship of the Ring (1954). It describes Aragorn, the ranger who looks like a shabby vagrant but turns out to be the heir to a throne. In context, wandering is a disguise for purpose.

Quote card: Two roads diverged in a wood – Robert Frost, over a dark forest path

2. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost. “The Road Not Taken” first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and opened Frost’s 1916 collection Mountain Interval. Frost wrote it partly as a joke for his friend, the poet Edward Thomas, who agonised over which path to take on their walks. Read closely, the poem is ironic: the narrator has already said the two roads were worn “really about the same”.

Quote card: I travel not to go anywhere, but to go – Robert Louis Stevenson, over a hiker on a boardwalk

3. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson. These lines close the chapter “Upper Gévaudan” in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879). Stevenson walked about 200 km across southern France in 12 days, from 22 September to 3 October 1878, from Le Monastier to Saint-Jean-du-Gard, with a donkey called Modestine carrying his gear.

Quote card: Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness – Mark Twain, over a man walking past old buildings

4. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” – Mark Twain. Twain’s line belongs to The Innocents Abroad (1869), his account of the 1867 “Great Pleasure Excursion” on the chartered steamship Quaker City, a five-month voyage through Europe and the Holy Land. The book mocked the grandiose travelogues of its day as much as the places Twain visited.

Ancient wisdom and a famous misquote

Quote card: The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step – Lao Tzu, over a forest trail

5. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Laozi (Lao Tzu). The saying is from Chapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching. In Chinese it reads 千里之行始於足下, more literally “a journey of a thousand li starts beneath one’s feet”, and it follows the lines “a huge tree grows from a tiny seedling; a nine-storied tower rises from a heap of earth”. It is sometimes wrongly credited to Confucius.

Quote card: The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page – Augustine of Hippo

6. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – credited to Augustine of Hippo. This is one of the most shared travel quotes in the world, always signed with the name of the 4th–5th-century bishop and theologian. It makes a neat image: every country another chapter.

Quote card: It is good to have an end to journey toward, credited to Ernest Hemingway, over a van at sunset

7. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” – Ursula K. Le Guin. The card says Hemingway, but the line was written by Ursula K. Le Guin in Chapter 15 of her 1969 science-fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness. Quote Investigator found no evidence that Hemingway ever said it; he died in 1961, and the first known credit to him appeared in a 2010 newspaper obituary.

Modern writers on the road and coming home

Quote card: Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don't be sorry – Jack Kerouac, over mossy stone steps

8. “Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.” – Jack Kerouac. Kerouac is the patron saint of restless travellers. Alongside On the Road, his novel Desolation Angels (published 1965) opens with his summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in Washington’s North Cascades, where he lasted 63 days alone on the mountain.

Quote card: Why do you go away? So that you can come back – Terry Pratchett, over an empty road

9. “Why do you go away? So that you can come back… Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – Terry Pratchett. From A Hat Full of Sky (2004), the 32nd Discworld novel and the second about Tiffany Aching, an 11-year-old apprentice witch who leaves her home on the Chalk to learn her craft and later returns. It is perhaps the wisest line here about what travel does to the person who comes home.

Quote card: Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow – Anita Desai, over a misty forest with a hiker

10. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” – Anita Desai. The Indian novelist’s line is short and quietly true: places stay with us long after the photographs fade.

Quote card: My cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude – Colette, over a black-and-white cat

11. “I went to collect the few personal belongings which… I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.” – Colette. The French novelist’s list of essentials is the most personal on this page, and the one that most travellers with a pet at home will recognise.

Using travel quotes well

A good quote is more powerful when you know its context. Tolkien’s wanderer is a king in hiding, Frost’s famous road is a gentle joke, and the “Hemingway” line belongs to Le Guin. If you use a line in a caption, journal or wedding speech, credit the real author and, where you can, the book.

To turn inspiration into a plan, our guide to a manageable first trip deals with the practical barriers, a five-second travel diary shows a simple way to remember a journey, and the travel-word guide collects seven words for the feelings travel brings.

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