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As a 3 time study abroad in London veteran, I know how important study abroad can be to helping you reach your goals.
In this list of study abroad quotes, prepare to be inspired and entertained as you laugh, reflect, and think about the ways that study abroad is capable of changing you in the best ways possible.
For me, these quotes about studying abroad aren’t just platitudes that you put on a postcard and send to your loved ones at home who are missing you.
They’re real life advice and experiences about culture shock, first time study abroad tips, and homesickness that you will really relate to if you’re planning or have ever studied abroad.
When I studied abroad in London, I used these inspirational quotes about studying abroad to help me make the best choices possible and spend my days wisely because it was over way too fast!
Famous Quotes about Studying Abroad
1. “It is better to travel well than to arrive.” – Buddha
2. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” – Mark Twain
3. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” – Helen Keller
4. “Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” – Neale Donald Walsch
5. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.” – St. Augustine
6. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
7. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself” – David Mitchell
Study Abroad Quotes to Make You Think
8. “The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.” – G.K. Chesterton
9. “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.” – Pascal Mercier
10. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” – Gustave Flaubert
11. “To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Anderson
12. “Do you know how horrid it feels to watch my brother get tossed out of the best boarding school of England, then get to travel the Continent as a reward, while I’m stuck behind, not permitted to study the same things or read the same books or even visit the same places while we’re abroad, just because I had the bad luck to be born a girl?” – Mackenzi Lee
13. “Studying in countries like China isn’t only about your prospects in the global marketplace. It’s not just about whether you can compete with your peers in other countries to make America stronger. It’s also about whether you can come together and work together with them to make our world stronger. It’s about the friendships you make, the bonds of trust you establish and the image of America that you project to the rest of the world.” – Michelle Obama
14. “There are days, there are times, when you feel like you’ve walked so far, when the voice inside you is complaining that it’s all uphill, that it always will be. And then, after all that, way beyond your blue horizon, you see the biggest mountains you’ve ever seen, and you think, “I can’t do that.” Well, I hope you always have somebody who tells you that you can. Like I’m telling you now.” – Windy Ariestanty
15. “One of the great failings of the American education system, in our view, is that young people can graduate from university without any understanding of poverty at home or abroad. Study-abroad programs tend to consist of herds of students visiting Oxford or Florence or Paris.
We believe that universities should make it a requirement that all graduates spend at least some time in the developing world, either by taking a “gap year” or by studying abroad. If more Americans worked for a summer teaching English at a school like Mukhtar’s in Pakistan, or working at a hospital like HEAL Africa in Congo, our entire society would have a richer understanding of the world around us. And the rest of the world might also hold a more positive view of Americans.” – Nicholas Kristof
16. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.” – Robert Frost
17. “Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.” – Isabelle Eberthardt
Study Abroad Quotes to Inspire You
18. “Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you.
You must travel it by yourself.
It is not far. It is within reach.
Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.” – Walt Whitman
19. “I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.” – John Steinbeck
20. “Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage” – Paulo Coelho
21. “Make voyages. Attempt them. There’s nothing else.” – Tennessee Williams
22. “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. 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
23. “Be fearless. Have the courage to take risks. Go where there are no guarantees. Get out of your comfort zone even if it means being uncomfortable. The road less traveled is sometimes fraught with barricades bumps and uncharted terrain. But it is on that road where your character is truly tested And have the courage to accept that you’re not perfect nothing is and no one is — and that’s OK.” – Katie Couric
24. “Travel light, live light, spread the light, be the light.” – Yogi Bhajan
25. “Along your pathway of life you will observe that you are not the only traveler. There are others who need your help. There are feet to steady, hands to grasp, minds to encourage, hearts to inspire, and souls to save.” – Thomas Monson
26. “The best traveler is one without a camera.” – Kamand Kojouri
27. “Whenever you go on a trip to visit foreign lands or distant places, remember that they are all someone’s home and backyard.” – Vera Nazarian
28. “Let’s not grow with our roots in the ground.” – Criss Jami
29. “Find something you love and go for it with all your heart. No excuses, no plan B. Never settle for anything less than you know you can do.
It will be hard, but I promise it will be worth it.” – Charlotte Erikson
30. “It’s in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.” – Aaron Lauritsen
31. “Don’t get so focused on where you’re going that you forget the people you’re travelling with. There’s no point reaching a destination if you arrive alone.” – Shaun David Hutchinson
Wonderful Quotes about Studying Abroad
32. “The world is full of wonderful things you haven’t seen yet. Don’t ever give up on the chance of seeing them.” – JK Rowling
33. “[the truth in regards to studying abroad] “you know what else is nice about being a foreigner? Whatever you do takes place in a capsule that need not be discovered and opened by someone back home. Nothing really counts–it was the life that falls in the forest. That’s how I looked at it. I felt free to…oh, I don’t know.” – Patricia Marx
34. “The beautiful thing about studying abroad is that you don’t study very much.” – Stephanie Wilson
35. “Every traveler has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.” – Charles Dickens
36. “because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars…” – Jack Kerouac
Best Study Abroad Quotes
37. “But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” – Bill Bryson
38. “Augustus,” I said. “Really. You don’t have to do this.”
“Sure I do,” he said. “I found my Wish.”
“God, you’re the best,” I told him.
“I bet you say that to all the boys who finance your international travel,” he answered.” – John Green
39. “to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” – Elizabeth Gilbert
40. “We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.” – Henry Ward Beecher
41. “I wandered everywhere, through cities and countries wide. And everywhere I went, the world was on my side.” – Roman Payne