Travel Photography Quotes To Inspire Your Adventures

Why do you travel, and what makes travel photography special to you? Whether you’re looking to get the best travel photography quotes for Instagram, to write on a travel photo or just to inspire you, I hope these do the trick!

I picked the quotes that spoke to me the most, and that I hope make you excited to take more travel photos, but also to wander and take more photos even in your own backyard. They’re from famous photographers, travelers, authors and more to help you live your best travel photography life!

Travel Photography Quotes

Let these quotes inspire you to take amazing travel photos, and to not be afraid to be yourself and photograph what you see. When you travel, you have an amazing story to tell, and photography is an excellent way to tell your story by showing others what you’ve seen and experienced!

1. “A photographer must be prepared to catch and hold on to those elements which give distinction to the subject or lend it atmosphere. They are often momentary, chance-sent things: a gleam of light on water, a trail of smoke from a passing train, a cat crossing a threshold, the shadows cast by a setting sun. Sometimes they are a matter of luck; the photographer could not expect or hope for them. Sometimes they are a matter of patience, waiting for an effect to be repeated that he has seen and lost or for one that he anticipates.” ― Bill Brandt

2. “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” ― Robert Frank

3. “Travel and photography have always been intertwined. I think we have such a brief amount of time in this world that I can’t think of a better use of my time than to travel, to photograph the world, experience life in different places. To me, there’s nothing more important than that.” ― Steve McCurry

4. “A traveler seeks engagement with the local people and culture, while a sightseer just checks off sights in the guidebook. A sightseeing photographer stands apart from the culture, snapping pictures at a distance. A travel photographer becomes involved with his or her surroundings and the people; the resulting pictures become more intimate.” ― Jim Richardson

5. “Sometimes the most interesting visual phenomena occur when you least expect it. Other times, you think you’re getting something amazing and the photographs turn out to be boring and predictable. So I think that’s why, a long time ago, I consciously tried to let go of artists’ angst, and instead just hope for the best and enjoy it. I love the journey as much as the destination. If I wasn’t a photographer, I’d still be a traveller.” ― Michael Kenna

6. “I hope to bring back pictures from the world that open people’s eyes – pictures that suggest the enigmatic nature of the world we live in, as well as its variety, complexity, beauty, and pain.” ― Alex Webb

7. “Don’t shoot what it looks like. Shoot what it feels like.” ― David Alan Harvey

8. “No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.” ― Ansel Adams

9. “It was more about trying to find the essence of the place, what was unique. What was it about this place that made it intriguing? There’s no guarantee that you’re going to make good pictures just because you happen to be in an exotic location. The same rules of photography still apply: light and composition and a particular moment. You may be in an incredible place with an incredible story to tell, but you still have to craft it in a certain way.” ― Steve McCurry

10. “It may look like I’m just pointing the camera at what’s in front of me. But I’m trying to photograph what people see, but don’t notice – something that’s mysterious and unknown in everyday life.” ― Daido Moriyama

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

12. “No place is boring if you had a good nights’ sleep and a pocket full of unexposed film.” ― Robert Adams

13. “Photography is a form of time travel.” ― Neil DeGrasse Tyson

14. “My life is shaped by the urgent need to wander and observe, and my camera is my passport.” ― Steve McCurry

15. “There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.” ― Ansel Adams

16. “Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.” ― Susan Sontag

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

18. “Sometimes I do get to places just when God’s ready to have somebody click the shutter.” ― Ansel Adams

19. “Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

20. “Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.” ― Ansel Adams

21. “When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.” ― Ansel Adams

22. “I wanted adventures. I wanted to go up the Nung river to the heart of darkness in Cambodia. I wanted to ride out into a desert on camelback, sand and dunes in every direction, eat whole roasted lamb with my fingers. I wanted to kick snow off my boots in a Mafia nightclub in Russia. I wanted to play with automatic weapons in Phnom Penh, recapture the past in a small oyster village in France, step into a seedy neon-lit pulqueria in rural Mexico. I wanted to run roadblocks in the middle of the night, blowing past angry militia with a handful of hurled Marlboro packs, experience fear, excitement, wonder. I wanted kicks – the kind of melodramatic thrills and chills I’d yearned for since childhood, the kind of adventure I’d found as a little boy in the pages of my Tintin comic books. I wanted to see the world – and I wanted the world to be just like the movies” – Anthony Bourdain

23. “It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after, you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and what’s happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.” ― Anthony Bourdain

24. “The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness.” ― Yann Arthus-Bertrand

25. “I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I’ve always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.” ― Sam Abell

26. “I brush aside words and ideas and focus on photography as a means of expressing a message that is both psychological and phenomenological. Without that framework, my approach is very simple – there is no artistry. I just shoot freely. For example, most of my snapshots I take from a moving car, or while running, without the finder, and in those instances, one might say that I’m taking the pictures more with my body than with my eyes.” ― Daido Moriyama

27. “Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever… It remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.” ― Aaron Siskind

28. “The camera makes you forget you’re there. It’s not like you are hiding but you forget, you are just looking so much.” ― Annie Leibovitz

29. “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” ― Diane Arbus

30. “The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” ― Paul Strand

31. “The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” ― Susan Meiselas

32. “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” ― Orson Welles

33. “If I could tell the story in words, I wouldn’t need to lug around a camera.” ― Lewis Hine

34. “The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” ― Dorothea Lange

35. “When the world asks, “what was it like?” Only the photographers can say, “See!” ― Mark Denman

36. “Your inspiration is better if it comes from many different sources and your sensibilities will transform all those influences and inspiration into your own visual world. It’s like reading the book instead of watching the movie.” ― Peter Lindbergh

37. “As a young person, and I know it’s hard to believe that I was shy, but you could take your camera, and it would take you to places: it was like having a friend, like having someone to go out with and look at the world. I would do things with a camera I wouldn’t do normally if I was just by myself.” ― Annie Leibovitz

Nature Travel Photography Quotes

Nature photography can be done wherever there’s nature, but even if you just go outside your front door to get a photo of a flower, it’s still travel in a sense – so these quotes apply to both! Exploration and discovery are common themes here. I love taking nature photos wherever I am, at home and while traveling!

38. “Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and wonder surrounding him.” ― Ansel Adams

39. “There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.” ― Ansel Adams

40. “The whole world is, to me, very much “alive” – all the little growing things, even the rocks. I can’t look at a swell bit of grass and earth, for instance, without feeling the essential life – the things going on – within them. The same goes for a mountain, or a bit of the ocean, or a magnificent piece of old wood.” ― Ansel Adams

41. “It is my intention to present – through the medium of photography – intuitive observations of the natural world which may have meaning to the spectators.” ― Ansel Adams

42. “Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.” ― Matt Hardy

43. “Nature is so powerful, so strong. Capturing its essence is not easy – your work becomes a dance with light and the weather. It takes you to a place within yourself.” ― Annie Leibovitz

Wanderlust Quotes

That feeling of wanting and needing to travel and explore, to experience new things, to just go somewhere other than your usual places… that’s wanderlust. It’s related to travel, but a bit different – so here are some quotes to inspire you, or to help you communicate that feeling of wanderlust!

44. “Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to.” ― Alan Keightley

45. “For always roaming with a hungry heart, much have I seen and known.” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson

46. “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

47. “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.” ― Judith Thurman

48. “Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

​​49. “Every experience is a form of exploration.” ― Ansel Adams

50. “Without experimentation, a willingness to ask questions and try new things, we shall surely become static, repetitive, and moribund.” ― Anthony Bourdain

Travel Quotes

Alright, now for some travel quotes to inspire you to get out there and travel so you can take some photos to share with the world, on your Instagram or elsewhere, and so you can get more stories and life experiences… travel helps us grow and evolve, which are things that also inspire great photography! When thinking of photography inspiration and ideas, these can help:

51. “Travel is never a matter of money but of courage.” ― Paulo Coelho

52. “It seems that the more places I see and experience, the bigger I realize the world to be. The more I become aware of, the more I realize how relatively little I know of it, how many places I have still to go, how much more there is to learn.” — Anthony Bourdain

53. “Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” — Mary Ritter Beard

54. “It is all very beautiful and magical here – a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago.” ― Ansel Adams

55. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” ― Robert Louis Stevenson

56. “I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find the perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one. Letting the happy accident happen is what a lot of vacation itineraries miss, I think, and I’m always trying to push people to allow those things to happen rather than stick to some rigid itinerary.” ― Anthony Bourdain

57. “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

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

59. “It liberates the vandal to travel — you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.” ― Mark Twain

60. “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. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” ― Anthony Bourdain

61. “I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.” ― Bill Bryson

62. “Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.” ― Peter Hoeg

63. “No place is ever as bad as they tell you it’s going to be.” ― Chuck Thompson

Adventure Travel Quotes

When you’re traveling, everything is an adventure if you let it be – the journey is sometimes more of an adventure than the destination! Here are some quotes to get you into the adventure mindset and get to snapping those photos:

64. “An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.” — Gilbert K. Chesterton

65. “So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” — Mark Twain

66. “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

67. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” — James Michener

68. “Few places in this world are more dangerous than home. Fear not, therefore, to try the mountain passes. They will kill care, save you from deadly apathy, set you free, and call forth every faculty into vigorous, enthusiastic action.” — John Muir

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

70. “A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.” — Henry Rollins

71. “Just to travel is rather boring, but to travel with a purpose is educational and exciting.” — Sargent Shriver

72. “With courage you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.” ― Mark Twain

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

Travel Short Unique Quotes

Need a quippy, unique travel quote for your Instagram or travel photos? Here ya go!

74. “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” ― Buddha

75. “A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” — Moslih Eddin Saadi

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

77. “You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.” – Paulo Coelho

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

79. “Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.” ― Ray Bradbury

80. “Be brave. Take risks. Nothing can substitute experience.” ― Paulo Coelho

81. “Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.” ― Anita Desai

82. “I think food, culture, people, and landscape are all absolutely inseparable.” ― Anthony Bourdain

83. “If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.” ― Paulo Coelho

84. “Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.” ― Teddy Roosevelt

Conclusion: 84 Best Travel Photography Quotes

So, there you have it! Quotes to inspire you to take more pictures, to photograph what you want, when and where because what you see matters – for your own memories, and for how you’re going to tell your travel stories to others (even if they only see your photos)!

You can definitely work on improving your photography skills as you go, but it’s mostly about developing your eye – getting what you see into the frame. Then, it’s all practice from there!