La Ivana Cert. Life Coach · The La Ivana Podcast

I can’t even tell you the number of times I searched for solo travel quotes to add to my Instagram captions. I’m one of those people that just loves a good quote that makes me get up and take action.

Oftentimes, I rely on Brendon Burchard for motivational quotes, but for the purpose of this post, I researched specifically solo travel quotes to inspire you to book a ticket and travel alone.

No, you don’t have to book a one-way ticket to a different continent. Even going on a one-day trip near the city you live in will give you a sense of newness and adventure.

95 percent of my travels were, in fact, solo travels, so I chose quotes that truly capture the essence of what it is to travel alone.

Initially, I thought that this list is easily going to have more than 50 solo travel quotes, but since I didn’t want to repeat the most common solo travel quotes, I decided to stick with ones that are not as popular.

Hope you’ll enjoy them!

And, if you want to hear how solo travel can change your life and help you build your confidence, listen to episode 39 of my podcast: Building Confidence while Traveling Alone & Tips for Solo Budget Travel w/ Marisa Vogiatzi

“Long-term solo traveling gives you the ability to be the architect of your own travel design – travel in your own vision and not how people tell you to.”
― Amit Vaidya

“I had chosen to leave, and live alone in a foreign country. And in fleeing thousands of miles across the Pacific, I chose myself, and a chance at a different future.”
― Alison Singh Gee

“Don’t put off your adventures while you wait for available friends to join.”
― Francis Shenstone

Exactly! So many times I would ask friends to join me to travel somewhere and the answers were always, ”I don’t have enough money./I can’t. I have to work.” That led to frustration because I didn’t want to go by myself and I felt like I couldn’t go if someone else wasn’t with me.

Nowadays, I don’t even ask other people. I choose where I want to go (whether that is two months in Bucharest or one day near my hometown) and I just go.

“I don’t care to duplicate the travels that others have taken.”
― Holly Winter Huppert

“We’re born to pilot our own plane and explore the world, not sit in the airport.”
― Francis Shenstone

“The treasured vistas of our solo journeys are not always about the landscape.”
― Gina Greenlee

“Until recently, it was considered that only losers, who obviously have zero friends in the whole wide world, are forced by their wretched fate to drag themselves alone along the paths of the planet. Today, traveling solo is perceived as a more normal phenomenon, one that we recommend you practice at least once a year.”
― Maria Angelova

“If you tell yourself that you need more riding experience, more mechanical prowess, more tools, a better bike, and try to cover every single contingency you might face before setting out for a weekend on the bike by yourself, you’ll likely never take a solo trip.”
― Tamela Rich

Yes! Stop focusing on excuses and instead ask yourself, ”What do I need to do to make this work?” See what comes up.

“There is sometimes a misconception that you have to be self-assured, oozing with confidence, a social butterfly, and comfortable with your own company to long-term solo travel. But that is simply not true.”
― Amit Vaidya

“If companionship is a mandate for all of our experiences, then we will miss out on many of life’s blessings.”
― Gina Greenlee

 

SAVE FOR LATER 🙂

“When you’re (traveling) with someone else, you share each discovery, but when you are alone, you have to carry each experience with you like a secret, something you have to write on your heart because there’s no other way to preserve it.”
― Shauna Niequist

“It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially molded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others… Being closely observed by a companion can also inhibit our observation of others; then, too, we may become caught up in adjusting ourselves to the companion’s questions and remarks, or feel the need to make ourselves seem more normal than is good for our curiosity.”
― Alain de Botton

“Some journeys in life can only be traveled alone.”
― Ken Poirot

“I guess I’m too selfish to travel well with other people.”
― Alice Steinbach

Some of my favorite solo travel quotes by Anthony Bourdain

“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody.
Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“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

“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

“There’s something about arriving in new cities, wandering empty streets with no destination. I will never lose the love for the arriving, but I’m born to leave.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Pack your bags and move cities and countries. Nothing will enrich you more than travel does.”
― Nikita Dudani

“I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.”
― Roman Payne

“How could I explain in words my craving for freedom, that longing for anonymity, the need to distance myself from everything I knew in my universe?”
― Shivya Nath

“The journey itself is my home.”
― Matsuo Basho

“It is a great privilege to travel alone on the right path knowing at heart that one day millions too will travel on that same road!”
― Mehmet Murat Ildan

“All I wanted was to live a life where I could be me and be okay with that. I had no need for material possessions, money, or even close friends with me on my journey. I never understood people very well anyway, and they never seemed to understand me very well either. All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality. I wanted the open road and new beginnings every day.”
― Charlotte Eriksson

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell

“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
― Wendell Berry

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to 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, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
― Cesare Pavese

“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

“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone because they reflect more.”
― Thomas Jefferson

“Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.”
― Thornton Wilder

 

“There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.”
― Kate Douglas Wiggin

Happens every time!

“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home – and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”
― Rolf Potts

I used to think that seeing MORE countries was the ultimate goal. It took time to understand that it’s not about rushing through 5 different countries in two weeks and saying that you’ve been somewhere.

Now I realize that traveling is about learning and absorbing the culture. It’s about talking to locals even if you don’t understand each other and using non-verbal communication more than actual words. It’s about using the public transport that they use every day.

Traveling is not about seeing the top 5 tourist attractions and taking a selfie in front of the main cathedral.

I mean… There’s nothing wrong with that, but that’s not how you get to know the essence of a country you’re in.

“No man is brave that has never walked a hundred miles. If you want to know the truth of who you are, walk until not a person knows your name. Travel is the great leveler, the great teacher, bitter as medicine, crueler than mirror-glass. A long stretch of road will teach you more about yourself than a hundred years of quiet introspection.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

“Personally, I like going places where I don’t speak the language, don’t know anybody, don’t know my way around, and don’t have any delusions that I’m in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.”
― Michael Mewshaw

Yes, yes, and YES!

Hey, want to learn how traveling can transform your life? And get some amazing tips to manifest your dream trip? Then listen to episode 38 of my podcast: Transformative Travel & Manifesting Travel Using Visualization w/ Maritza Chavez.

“Through travel, I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.”
― Eudora Welty

“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience — buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello — become new all over again.”
― Anthony Doerr

SAVE FOR LATER 🙂

“I don’t know what I shall do. I just want to go away and look at people and think.”
― Sherwood Anderson

“Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else – above all, a travel bureau – arrange everything beforehand?”
― Richard Aldington

“It is not the destination where you end up but the mishaps and memories you create along the way.”
― Penelope Riley

Want to know about my mishaps? Here is the post where I shared mistakes I made while traveling solo. Yikes! (Getting lost in Vienna after midnight with an empty phone battery: check!)

“I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.”
― Paulo Coelho

“How you live your life is up to you. You have to go out and grab the world by the horns. Rope it before it ties you down and decides for you.”
― Sarah Reijonen

“If you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
― Richard Yates

“If you learn to really sit with loneliness and embrace it for the gift that it is – an opportunity to get to know you, to learn how strong you really are, to depend on no one but you for your happiness, you will realize that a little loneliness goes a long way in creating a richer, deeper, more vibrant and colorful you.”
― Mandy Hale

I can easily say that the last solo travel quote I’m sharing with you today is one I resonate with the most.

“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 Eberhardt

Absolutely beautiful.

Tell me, reader, which one of these solo travel quotes is your favorite? Share it in the comments below, I’m curious to know!

Also, pin this post for later – if you love solo travel quotes, I know you’ll want to get reinspired again 🙂

Until the next time,

Ivana

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