The Top 102 Adventure Quotes For You

It may sound silly, but I love adventure quotes. Yes, I’ve been to dozens of places, I’ve seen the good and the bad sides of traveling, and I’m not supposed to get excited by just words, but still, I am.

Traveling is not an easy task. A lot of times, you just feel down and lonely and question if it’s really worth it (spoiler alert – yes it is). Reading adventure quotes have always helped me in those times. It’s strange how just a few words can change your mood entirely and let you see things from another perspective.

Here’s why I decided to share my favorite adventure quotes with you. 
Maybe you need that extra push to book your one-way ticket, or perhaps you’re already on the road – tired and beaten up. Even if you only need an Instagram/Facebook capture for the cool photo you just made,
I’m pretty sure one of my collection would be just the thing you need right now!

Famous Adventure Quotes

1. “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
― Helen Keller

2. “Adventure is worthwhile in itself.”
― Amelia Earhart

3. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll

4. “If we were meant to stay in one place, we’d have roots instead of feet.”
― Rachel Wolchin

5. “The danger of adventure is worth a thousand days of ease and comfort.”
― Paulo Coelho

6. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― Andre Gide

7. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
― Mark Twain

Mark Twain is an excellent source of not only adventure quotes, but all kinds of wisdom. The man was simply way ahead of its time.
This particular quote is as valid today as it was 150 years ago. Maybe even more.
As you start exploring the world, you begin to understand that there are no “Those People.” It’s all “us.” Yes, there may be slight cultural differences, but at its core, all people are the same.

8. “Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchet

9. “Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”
― J.K. Rowling

10. “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
— Bilbo Baggins

11. “Adventure may hurt you, but monotony will kill you.”
— Marcus Purvis

12. “Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.”
— Ibn Battuta

13. “To Travel is to Live”
— Hans Christian Andersen

14. “Jobs fill your pockets, but adventures fill your soul.”
― Jaime Lyn

15. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.”
― Lao Tzu

This one is among the oldest quotes in existence. It’s not surprising since it’s wisdom is eternal.
The Chinese motivational proverb teaches us that no matter how tough or impossible something is, if we took the initiative, if we take that first step, the rest of the venture falls into place.
All great adventures commence with simple beginnings.

16. “Of all the books in the world, the best stories are found between the pages of a passport.”
― Unknown

17. “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.”
― Douglas Adams

18. “Cover the earth before it covers you.”
— Dagobert Runes

19. “People don’t take trips, trips take people.”
— John Steinbeck

20. “And into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.”
— John Muir

Short Adventure Quotes

21. “The journey matters more than the destination.”
― Tony Fahkry

An adventure quote does not have to be long to have meaning. This one may be just seven words, but it shows you the foundation of every travel.
No matter the destination you pick, no matter how impressive its landmarks are, the way your journey goes will determine if you like it or not.
The most boring country may be your best trip, while the most exciting one could be your worst.
And no matter if your journey was successful or not, you are now changed. And this change remains with you for life.

22. “So shut up, live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.”
― Jack Kerouac

23. “All good things are wild and free.”
― Henry David Thoreau

24. “Attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure.”
— Bob Bitchin

25. “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
— Anais Nin

26. “Never fear quarrels, but seek hazardous adventures.”
― Alexandre Dumas

27. “Adventure is not outside man; it is within.”
― George Eliot

28. “There is no certainty; there is only adventure.”
― Roberto Assagioli

29. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained. And venture belongs to the adventurous.”
— Navjot Singh Sidhu

30. “It’s not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
― Sir Edmund Hillary

A classic adventure quote.
This one may sound a bit cliche, but a lot of people don’t figure this out until it’s too late. Every mountain, every journey, every action that takes us outside of our comfort zone is a scary adventure.
But the adventure itself is not the frightening part. The scary part is inside us. That inner voice inside you that demand to stay in the known, safe place you’re now.
When you conquer that inner voice, you’ve conquered the mountain.

31. “Sometimes getting lost is not a waste of time.”
― Unknown

32. “I travel because I become uncomfortable being too comfortable.”
― Carew Papritz

33. “It’s bad manners to keep an adventure waiting.”
― Unknown

34. “Oh, the places you’ll go.”
— Dr. Seuss

35. “Go where you feel most alive.”
— Unknown

36. “Live your life by a compass, not a clock.”
— Stephen Covey

37. “Blessed are the curious for they shall have adventures.”
— Lovelle Drachman

38. “It feels good to be lost in the right direction.”
— Unknown

39. “Life without adventure is like pizza without cheese.”
— The Global Castaway

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

One of my favorite adventure quotes! To travel is more than a physical journey to see some landmarks and post some photos on Instagram.
Every trip you embark on is also an inward journey where you learn more about yourself. Changing basically everything around would submerge you into another world with its own marvels.
The more words you explore, the bigger the chance to find who you truly are!

The Rest of my Adventure Quotes Collection

41. “Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson

42. “The gladdest moment in human life is a departure into unknown lands.”
— Sir Richard Burton

43. “It’s time to say goodbye, but I think goodbyes are sad, and I’d much rather say hello. Hello to a new adventure.”
― Ernie Harwell

44. “The biggest adventure you can ever take is to live the life of your dreams.”
― Oprah Winfrey

45. “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.”
― Patrick Rothfuss

46. “Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.”
― Seanan McGuire

47. “Then one day, when you least expect it, the great adventure finds you.”
— Ewan Mcgregor

48. “It is never too late to be who you might have been.”
— George Eliot

George Eliot was the pen name of the author Mary Anne Evans who started her writing career at 37 (which is quite old for the Victorian era). She used man’s name so her books could be taken seriously, and she most definitely succeeded. 

Her words give us the motivation to ignore the age-excuse and just go for it. If Mary Anne Evans can become a successful “male” writer after her prime years were long gone, what is our excuse?

49. “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are built for.”
— John G. Shed

50. “One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.”
— William Feather

51. “The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”
— W.M. Lewis

52. “Adventures don’t come calling like unexpected cousins calling from out of town. You have to go looking for them.”
― Unknown

53. “Always there has been an adventure just around the corner…and the world is still full of corners.”
― Roy Chapman Andrews

54. “In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.”
― John Muir

55. “Every day is an adventure, and no two days are ever alike.”
― Scott Borchetta

56. “Be careful going in search of adventure – it’s ridiculously easy to find.”
― William Least Heat-Moon

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

58. “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”
― Christopher McCandless

59. “Life is full of adventure. There’s no such thing as a clear pathway.”
― Guy Laliberte

60. “Kids are curious, and if you don’t lose that, then everything is an adventure.”
― Diane Greene

61. “No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
― Lewis Carroll

62. “Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.”
― Danny Kaye

As far as adventure quotes go, this is not the most adventurous one. It’s on my list because I love the metaphor here.
Try to imagine your life as a canvas. Really, close your eyes and imagine it.
Staying in the same place, doing what’s everybody’s expecting you to do would give you only one color to paint with – grey. Your painting would be like a million other pictures.
Get out of your comfort zone, get more colors, make the painting of your life as different and colorful as possible. Make sure that when your time comes, you would be proud of your masterpiece!

63. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.”
― Aristophanes

64. “I feel very adventurous. There are so many doors to be opened, and I’m not afraid to look behind them.”
― Elizabeth Taylor

65. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving.”
― Lao Tzu

66. “A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure.”
― Pico Iyer

67. “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

68. “Until you step into the unknown, you don’t know what you’re made of.”
― Roy T. Bennett

69. “I travel because I’d rather look back at my life, saying ‘I can’t believe I did that’ instead of ‘if only I had’.”
― Florine Bos

70. “Then I realized that to be more alive, I had to be less afraid. So I did it. I lost my fear and gained my whole life.”
― Unknown

71. “Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure.”
― Drew Houston

Another of my favorite adventure quotes!
In today’s busy world, it’s very easy to get caught in the rat race. Grinding your way up the ladder with the sole assumption that once you reach a certain level of riches, your life would be perfect. Well, life is never perfect, and the rat rave ladder never ends. Drew Houston’s wise words make us reevaluate the life we’re living and what is truly important.

72. “Go out in the woods, go out. If you don’t go out in the woods, nothing will ever happen, and your life will never begin.”
—Clarissa Pinkola Estes

73. “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
— Marcel Proust

74. “May your adventures bring you closer together, even as they take you far away from home.”
― Trenton Lee Stewart

75. “You’re off to Great Places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting, so… get on your way!”
—Dr. Seuss

76. “Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing.”
― Barry Finlay

77. “There’s only one place I want to go, and it’s to all the places I’ve never been to.”
― Nikki Rowe

78. “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”
— Ernest Hemingway

79. “When you see someone putting on his Big Boots, you can be pretty sure that an Adventure is going to happen.”
— A.A. Milne

80. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by.”
— Robert Frost

81. “There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru

82. “If happiness is the goal – and it should be, then adventures should be a top priority.”
― Richard Branson

83. “You are not in the mountains. The mountains are in you.”
— John Muir

84. “The world is not in your books and maps; it’s out there.”
— Gandalf

What better source of adventure quotes than Gandalf!
I mean, the guy lived for hundreds of years, fought orcs and demons and even died once.
And he’s not wrong here. You can read everything about a destination, know every street, every house and every landmark, but you’d never know it this way.
Get up early, walk the empty streets, taste the air, feel the essence. As good as books are, to see the world, you need to leave them down and go out there!

85. “Life movies pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around every once in a while, you could miss it.”
— Ferris Bueller

86. “I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”
— Sylvia Plath

87 “Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.”
― David McCullough Jr.

88. “I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”
― Mary Anne Radmacher

89. “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

90. “Never do things others can do and will do if there are things others cannot do or will not do.”
― Amelia Earhart

91. “The world is big, and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.”
— John Muir

92. “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― G.K. Chesterton

93. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

94. “Better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.”
— Asian Proverb

Another timeless Asian proverb that should be your credo. Since all people are different, their perceptions will be different too.
Don’t build an opinion about a place, its people, or its highlights, based on another person’s experience. Prejudice is a trait that lives only among short-minded people who never even tried to see the world for themselves.

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

96. “As soon as I saw you, I knew adventure was going to happen.”
— Winnie the Pooh

97. “Travel doesn’t become an adventure until you leave yourself behind.”
— Marty Rubin

98. “Make everything an adventure. Otherwise, it will suck.”  
― Nita Morgan

99. “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”
— Anthony Bourdain

100. “One travels to run away from routine, that dreadful routine that kills all imagination and all our capacity for enthusiasm.”
― Ella Maillart

101. “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”
— T.E. Lawrence

102. “The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” 
― Thomas Alva Edison

That’s all from me, I hope you enjoyed my collection of awesome adventure quotes!
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If you haven’t planned your trip there yet, find out how I plan my trips!
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Those quotes pushed me to embark on a quest around the world. See my impossible bucket list of 1700+ adventures!

Which adventure quote is your favorite?

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