57 Travel Alone Quotes to Inspire Your Solo Travels
There’s something magical about traveling alone or going on solo adventures. Oftentimes we are forced to confront fears we’ve held close to us for a long time... and also welcome in new fears we didn’t even know existed.
Traveling alone forces us to grow and test what we are really made of. When no one we know is around, can we make new friends? Can we feel comfortable going out and exploring on our own? When something goes wrong, can we figure it out on our own? Or be brave enough to ask for help from strangers?
The first solo-travel trip I ever went on was a trip to Thailand. I had recently graduated college and up that that point had never traveled across the world on my own without people I’ve known and trusted. It was thrilling and terrifying at the same time, but I was determined to prove to myself that I had what it took to see the world on my own.
I was recently divorced, and I guess you could say I was wondering if I would let the fact that I was alone prevent me from traveling and seeing the world like I had always intended and wanted to when I was married. The answer had to be no! I knew I could be the kind of person who could learn to enjoy solo travel, and who could learn to make new friends and push myself out of my comfort zone. That adventure changed my life.
Similarly, when I decided I’d like to go on my first solo outdoor backpacking adventure, there were all kinds of fears that welled up inside of me. What if there were bears? What if I got hurt? What if I got lost? What if a strange person approached me on the trails?
I acknowledged all my concerns, but still felt confident in going solo. I had already been backpacking for years, and this trip wouldn’t be much different than that... except that I would be on my own. I LOVED that solo trip into the mountains.
I felt strong. I felt smart. I felt brave. I felt things that I don’t always feel when I’m with a group of people.
The mind likes to come up with a lot of reason why you shouldn’t step out of your comfort zone, why it would be horrible to venture out on your own, but I hope that through these 57 travel alone quotes you’ll see that there is beauty in going solo. There’s transformation and there’s self-discovery.
Yes, there’s fear, but there’s also bravery. When we travel alone, we find out what we’re made of. We learn a little bit more about what’s holding ourselves back, and we get to experience the world in a new way.
So without further ado:
57 Quotes about Traveling Alone
Inspiring Travel Alone Quotes
“The man who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The man who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.” - Francis Phillip Wernig
"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
“Traveling alone was like laundry for my thoughts.” - Mark Foster
“You should view each new travel frustration—sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict—as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure.” - Rolf Potts
“One thing that I love about traveling is feeling disoriented and removed from my comfort zone” - Sarah Glidden
“I wondered why it was that places are so much lovelier when one is alone.” - Daphne du Maurier
“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
“The man who goes alone can start today, but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.” - Henry David Thoreau
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ADVENTURING alone quotes
“I was forced to wander, having no one, forced by my nature to keep wandering because wandering was the only thing that I believed in, and the only thing that believed in me.” - Roman Payne
“Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It’s just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.” - Rolf Potts
“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.” - J.R.R. Tolkien
“If you travel too often, you actually come face-to-face with what you're trying to escape. I feel like when I travel alone, sometimes it's like being locked in a hotel room with my own worst enemy.” - Simon Van Booy
“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope;” - Rolf Potts
“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
“Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.” - The Dhammapada
“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more.” - Thomas Jefferson
“There are some places in life where you can only go alone. Embrace the beauty of your solo journey.” - Mandy Hale
“I knew then that I wanted to go home, but I had no home to go to – and that is what adventures are all about” – Trina Schart Hyman
“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
“Anything we fully do is an alone journey.” - Natalie Goldberg
FINDING YOURSELF TRAVELING ALONE QUOTES
“The most important relationship in your life is the relationship you have with yourself. Because no matter what happens, you will always be with yourself.” - Diane Von Furstenberg
“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
“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
“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
“Wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking” – Martha Barron Barrett
“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.” - Rolf Potts
“Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.” - John Muir
“Traveling solo does not always mean you’re alone. Most often, you meet marvelous people along the way and make connections that last a lifetime.” – Jacqueline Boone
“Don’t be scared to walk alone. Don’t be scared to like it.” - John Mayer
“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
"You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself." - Ella Maillart
WOMEN TRAVELING ALONE QUOTES
“The life you have led doesn’t need to be the only life you have.” – Anna Quindlen
“Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away” – Barbara De Angelis
“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 now 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
“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
“I do recall one moment when I went to India by myself. I was paralyzed with fear to travel alone, but I had this intuitive hint that I had to do it. It was transformative and beautiful.” - Jen Sincero
“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
SOLO TRAVEL QUOTES
“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
“To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.” - Rolf Potts,
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion with one’s courage” – Anaïs Nin
“The most effective way to do it, is to do it” – Amelia Earhart
“Not I, nor anyone else, can travel that road for you. You must travel it for yourself.” — Walt Whitman
"We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls." - Anais Nin
"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
“Having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment—not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.” - Rolf Potts
“When the traveler goes alone he gets acquainted with himself.” - Liberty Hyde Bailey
“Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.” – Wendell Berry
"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all." - Helen Keller
“Because of my capacity for listening to strangers' tales, or the details of their lives, my patience with their food and their crotchets, my curiosity that borders on nosiness, I am told that anyone traveling with me experiences an unbelievable tedium, and this is why I choose to travel alone.” - Paul Theroux
“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me” – Ayn Rand
“Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.” - Henry Rollins
GRAB MY [FREE] OUTDOOR BACKPACKER STARTER KIT
I created the Ultimate Outdoor Backpacker Starter Kit for you (and it's FREE)! This starter kit is filled with 14 pages of my best hiking and backpacking tips to help you learn what it takes to become a safe, confident, and self-sufficient outdoor backpacker!
EVEN MORE TRAVEL ALONE QUOTES
"You are the one that possesses the keys to your being. You carry the passport to your own happiness." - Diane von Furstenberg
“The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life” – Agnes Repplier
"You must go on adventures to find out where you belong." - Sue Fitzmaurice
“I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.” - Storm Jameson
"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world." - Freya Stark
“Adventure should be part of everyone’s life. It is the whole difference between being fully alive and just existing” – Holly Morris
Before we part, I’ll leave you with two final quotes that I LOVE.
“Dare to live the dreams you have dreamed for yourself.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
&
“Live a life more strongly driven by curiosity than by fear.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic
If I’m being honest, those two quotes are really what She Dreams of Alpine is all about. It’s one thing to dream of beautiful mountains, hiking beautiful places, and traveling all around the world. It’s another thing to LIVE those dreams. Let your curiosity and your dreams drive your life… not your fears.
So if you left with just one thing, dare to live your dreams… even if that means going solo!
Happy solo traveling!
Feeling inspired by these quotes? Check out 60 Beautifully Inspirational Mountain Quotes for even more wisdom!
Cheers,
Allison - She Dreams of Alpine
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