21 Quotes About Solo Travel That Will Make You Less Afraid Of It

Here are 21 quotes about traveling by celebrated adventurers of old and present day, because sometimes all you need are the right words to create that spark:

1.

“It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially moulded 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, The Art of Travel

2.

“When I think back on the girl in the cubicle, the one who was told that she couldn’t ever be happy anywhere if she couldn’t be happy with that life she held back then, I’m so glad that she took a leap of faith and didn’t listen to the naysayers. Rather than acting out of fear and holding onto a life that didn’t feel right, I acted out of love for myself and curiosity for the world and took a chance. I hope that any woman who finds herself in that position does the same.” – Kristin Addis, A Thousand New Beginnings

3.

“Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.” — Hannah Arendt

4.

“Never did the world make a queen of a girl who hides in houses and dreams without traveling.” ― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

5.

“My spirit gets nourished in faraway places. Sometimes I wonder if it’s a biological need, perhaps a biological flaw that compels me to seek the excitement and challenge that comes of being in a place where nobody knows me. Other times I think that my compulsion to settle into communities that are different from the ones I know is related to my passion for experiential learning. I learn best and most happily by doing, touching, sharing, tasting. When I’m somewhere I’ve never been before, learning goes on all day, every day.” ― Rita Golden Gelman, Tales of a Female Nomad: Living at Large in the World

6.

“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

7.

“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.” – Freya Stark, Passionate Nomad

8.

“A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.” ― Isabelle Eberhardt

9.

“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

10.

“I’ll never wonder why it would be like to sail across an ocean or move to Europe or just take a year off to chill out. I’ll never doubt myself in a strange land, never be scared of languages or funky rooms. America’s foreign wars won’t seem quite as alien as they might have, because of the places I hitchhiked when I was barely grown. I won’t be cynical about human nature, because strangers have helped me so many times. I followed my wanderlust. It bruised me sometimes, and took me to all kinds of highs.” -Elisabeth Eaves, Wanderlust

11.

“You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.” ― Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

12.

“The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” — Henry David Thoreau

13.

“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.” ― Natalie Goldberg

14.

“The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving. I didn’t want to destroy anything or anybody. I just wanted to slip quietly out the back door, without causing any fuss or consequences, and then not stop running until I reached Greenland.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

15.

“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

16.

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

17.

“After midnight, the moon set, and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the esthetic appeal of flying.” – Amelia Earhart

18.

“The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” – Anna Quindlen

19.

“You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.” – Ella Maillart

20.

“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

21.

“I love that I am but one of millions of single girls hitting the road by themselves these days. A hateful little ex-boyfriend once said that a houseful of cats used to be the sign of a terminally single woman, but not it’s a house full of souvenirs acquired on foreign adventures. He said it derogatorily: Look at all of this tragic overcompensating in the form of tribal masks and rain sticks. But I say that plane tickets replacing cats might be the best evidence of women’s progress as a gender. I’m damn proud of us. Also, since I have both a cat and a lot of foreign souvenirs, I broke up with that dude and went on a really great trip.” ― Kristin Newman, What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding