Regardless of how big our appetite for adventure, it’s easy to fall into a routine and become stagnant. Tunnel vision sets in; we get so caught up in the day to day that we forget what the adrenaline of the unknown feels like. When this happens, life is probably too comfortable for our own good.

If you’re vigorously nodding your head in agreement, check out these 27 quotes on life and travel to revive the adventure bug inside and inspire your next expedition. 

1. “Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.” – T.S Eliot

2. “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” – G.K. Chesterton

3. “To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self…. And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one’s self.” – Søren Kierkegaard

4. “Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.” – Pico Iyer

5. “One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.” – André Gide

6. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” – Aldous Huxley

7. “Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert

8. “The one who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone, is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.” – Alan Ashley-Pitt, pseudonym. of Francis Phillip Wernig

9. “The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

10. “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

11. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” – Dagobert D. Runes

12. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” – Benjamin Disraeli

13. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew

14. “Though we travel the world over to the find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

15. And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” – John Muir

16. “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.” – Christopher McCandless

17. “Because in the end, you won’t remember the time you spent working in an office or mowing your lawn. Climb that goddamn mountain.” – Jack Kerouac

18. “I am not the same after having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” – Mary Anne Radmacher

19. “If it scares you, it might be a good thing to try.” – Seth Godin 

20. “Nothing adventured, nothing attained.” – Peter McWilliams 

21. “There are 30,000 days in your life. When I was 24, I realized I’m almost 9,000 days down. There are no warm-ups, no practice rounds, no reset buttons. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable. Every day, we’re writing a few more words of a story. I wanted my story to be an adventure and that’s made all the difference.” – Drew Houston 

22. “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 

23. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” – Anaïs Nin

24. “The man who can go alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” – Henry David Thoreau

25. “Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.” – Lawrence Block

26. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

27. “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it’s lethal.” – Paulo Coelho

Hopefully more than a few of those resonated and you’re seeing clearly again.

And should you need an afternoon to get back to center during your next adventure—HotelsByDay will be there, now offering quality day rooms in four continents with more locations and hotels added each day!

Photo credits

Featured image by David Marcu via Unsplash

Waterfall rainbow by Matthew Morse via Pixabay

Tall Trees by Chelsea Bock via Unsplash

Landscape Nature by Alex Leroy via Pixabay