When life feels mundane and repetetive, I know it’s time to either:
- a) Go on a slow, unguided walk
- b) Take a long road trip
As far as I’m concerned, these two activities should be regular non-negotiables in our lives.
A road trip allows you to explore places off the beaten trail, and take your own time to do it. When you’re behind the wheel, you automatically seem to disconnect from your regular thought patterns and reflect, get lost in conversation, and make unexpected connections.
I thought it would be fun to put together this little collection of road trip quotes to highlight this feeling of freedom on the open road.
Here’s to your future adventures.
Road Trip Quotes
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.
Jack kerouac
You may not find a path, but you will find a way.
Tom Wolfe
People don’t take trips, trips take people.
John Steinbeck
I may not have ended up where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
Douglas Adams
Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
Rebecca Solnit
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.
Izaak Walton
A road trip is a way for the whole family to spend time together and annoy each other in interesting and new places.
Tom Lichtenheld
The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
William Least Heat Moon
Because the greatest part of a road trip isn’t arriving at your destination.
Emma Chase
Look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.
Tom Stoppard
You know more of a road by having traveled it than by all the conjectures and descriptions in the world.
William Hazlitt
The only impossible journey is the one you never begin.
Tony Robbins
A bend in the road, is not the end of the road….unless you fail to make the turn.
Helen Keller
If you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Scott Myers
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
God made the world round so we would never be able to see too far down the road.
Isak Dinesen
The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
Alain de Botton
Look at life through the windshield, not the rearview mirror.
Byrd Baggett
When all’s said and done, all roads lead to the same end. so it’s not so much which road you take, as how you take it.
Charles de Lint
The mind can never break off from the journey.
Pat Conroy
Look for chances to take the less-traveled roads. There are no wrong turns.
Susan Magsamen
If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.
Lewis carroll
Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.
Elizabeth Berg
I climb behind the steering wheel… I drive off immediately without once looking back; it’s a long journey but it leads to freedom.
Corinne Hofmann
Road trips require a couple of things: a well balanced diet of caffeine, salt and sugar, and an excellent set of tunes – oh, and directions.
Jenn Mckinlay
Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go.
T.S Eliot
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Still, round the corner, there may wait, a new road or a secret gate.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by.
Robert Frost
A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.
Romesh Gunesekera
I love road trips. you get into this zen rhythm; throw the sense of time out the window.
Miriam Toews
When you go on a road trip, the trip itself becomes part of the story.
Steve Rushin
Discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust
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.
Anthony Bourdain
If you’re not lost, you’re not much of an explorer.
John Perry Barlow
That’s why I love road trips, dude. It’s like doing something without actually doing anything.
John Green
To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give, to roam the roads of lands remote, to travel is to live.
Hans Christian Andersen
One of the great things about travel is that you find out how many good, kind people there are.
Edith Wharton
In life, it’s not where you go – it’s who you travel with.
Charles M. Schulz
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
Mark Twain
Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.
Confucius
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
Ernest Hemingway
A man practices the art of adventure when he breaks the chain of routine and renews his life through reading new books, traveling to new places, making new friends, taking up new hobbies and adopting new viewpoints.
Wilfred Peterson
I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you’re proud of. If you find that you’re not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again.
Eric Roth
One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of seeing things.
Henry Miller
I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Part of us believes the new car is better because it lasts longer. But, in fact, that’s the worst thing about the new car. It will stay around to disappoint you, whereas a trip to Europe is over. It evaporates. It has the good sense to go away, and you are left with nothing but a wonderful memory.
Daniel Gilbert
Of all the paths you take in life make sure a few of them are dirty.
John Muir
I take to the open road. healthy, free, the world before me.
Walt Whitman
I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.
Paulo Coelho
To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.
Freya Stark
Oh, the places you’ll go.
Dr. Seuss
Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.
Anita Desai
Road trips required a couple of things: a well-balanced diet of caffeine, salt and sugar and an excellent selection of tunes- oh, and directions.
Jenn Mckinlay
If you’re on a road trip, you need driving music.
Edgar Wright
A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. and all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.
John Steinbeck
Parting Words
Road trips are so much more than a method of getting from point A to point B. Just like walking, they’re a chance for exploration, unexpected detours, and serendipitous encounters.
The best ones have no set deadlines. Just you, a good campanion or two, and the open road. You lose track of all time feel completely free.
They’re some of the best memories you’ll look back on.
What’s your favorite of the road trip quotes? Have another you’d add? Let me know in the comments!
P.S. If you liked this, you might also enjoy these related quote collections:
- Quotes About Finding Yourself
- Quotes About Distance
- Quotes About Vacation
- Quotes About Experimentation
- Quotes About Flâneurs and Flânerie
Originally published October 3, 2022. The date of the last significant update is reflected at the top of the post.
