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40 Powerful Travel Quotes From Famous Women

Culture
by Veruska Anconitano Mar 2, 2018

To celebrate Women’s History Month, here are 40 powerful and inspirational travel quotes from some of the world’s most famous and inspirational women. They remind us that not only is the future female, but the past was too.

Do any of these travel quotes resonate with you?

1. “As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

Virginia Woolf, novelist.

2. “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, poet.

3. “Just watch, all of you men. I’ll show you what a woman can do… I’ll go across the country, I’ll race to the Moon… I’ll never look back.”

Edna Gardner Whyte, pioneer aviatrix.

4. “Anybody can be an explorer if they want to be. You can be an astronaut if you want. Figure out what you want to do, and then go do it.”

Helen Thayer, the first woman to travel solo to the magnetic North Pole.

5. “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

Helen Keller, educator and author.

6. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.”

Susan Sontag, writer, filmmaker, teacher, and political activist.

7. “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.”

Shirley MacLaine, actress.

8. “It is confidence in our bodies, minds and spirits that allows us to keep looking for new adventures, new directions to grow in, and new lessons to learn — which is what life is all about.”

Oprah Winfrey, TV personality.

9. “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, novelist.

10. “I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, novelist.

11. “Where you come from does matter — but not nearly as much as where you are headed.”

Jodi Picoult, novelist.

12. “The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.”

Frances Mayes, professor, poet, memoirist, essayist, and novelist.

13. “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”

Mary Anne Radmacher, author.

14. “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, anthropologist.

15. “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, politician, diplomat and activist.

16. “Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent.”

Margot Fonteyn, ballerina.

17. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.”

Lillian Smith, social critic.

18. “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, writer and poet.

19. “As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”

Margaret Mead, anthropologist.

20. “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.”

Agnes Repplier, essayist.

21. “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, explorer and travel writer.

22. “Travel is the frivolous part of serious lives, and the serious part of frivolous ones.”

Anne Sophie Swetchine, mystic and salon owner.

23. “An adventure may be worn as a muddy spot or it may be worn as a proud insignia. It is the woman wearing it who makes it the one thing or the other.”

Norma Shearer, actress.

24. “To shut your eyes is to travel.”

Emily Dickinson, writer.

25. “I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.”

Daphne Du Maurier, writer.

26. “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life.”

Agnes Repplier, essayist.

27. “Adventure can be an end in itself. Self-discovery is the secret ingredient.”

Grace Lichtenstein, journalist.

28. “An adventure may be worn as a muddy spot or it may be worn as a proud insignia. It is the woman wearing it who makes it the one thing or the other.”

Norma Shearer, actress

29. “Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

Mary Ritter Beard, historian.

30. “I can’t understand why men make all this fuss about Everest.”

Junko Tabei, the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

31. “If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.”

Angelina Jolie, actress.

32. “To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.”

Elizabeth Gilbert, writer.

33. “Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’”

Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, novelist.

34. “Travel opens your mind as few other things do. It is its own form of hypnotism, and I am forever under its spell.”

Libba Bray, writer

35. “Don’t let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It’s your place in the world; it’s your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.”

Mae Jemison, first African-American female woman to travel in space.

36. “Travel is as much a passion as ambition or love.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon, writer and poet.

37. “Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.”

Mary Ritter Beard, historian.

38. “The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them.”

Amelia E. Barr, writer.

39. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”

Anais Nin, writer.

40. “I travel light. I think the most important thing is to be in a good mood and enjoy life, wherever you are”.

Diane von Furstenberg, fashion designer.

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