125 Vacation Quotes—Best Vacation Quotes

It doesn’t matter where you live—whether you’re buried 10 feet in snow right now or live on the sunny west coast—we can all use a change of scenery from time to time. And that’s why the ever-coveted vacation was invented.

Vacations bring us back to who we are. They offer respite, a change of pace, and give us a chance to unwind and take a break from our normal day-to-day lives. Whether you vacation in the islands or travel to some far away place you’ve never been before, there’s nothing like a vacation to settle the mind and body.

Can’t take a vacation just yet? That’s OK—reading up on the best vacation quotes is the next best thing. Check out these 125 vacation quotes and we guarantee you’ll be booking your next flight in no time.

1. “A vacation is what you take when you can no longer take what you’ve been taking.” —Earl Wilson

2. “Vacations mean a change of pace, a gentleness with ourselves, a time of rest and renewal, and a time to stretch ourselves and encounter new people, new lands, new ways, and new options.” —Anne Wilson Schaef

3. “After a while, just staying alive becomes a full-time job. No wonder we need a vacation.” —Michael Zadoorian

4. “We’re gonna grab a bite at the pizza stand. Write love letters in the sand. We’re on vacation and the world is ours.” —Connie Francis, “Vacation”

5. “To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love

6. “Take a vacation from your stressful thoughts by changing your thoughts.” –Debasish Mridha

7. “Time well spent results in more money to spend, more money to save, and more time to vacation.” –Zig Ziglar

8. “The thing I love most about going on vacation is that I get to leave behind any kind of schedule. My entire life is scheduled from morning to night, and when I’m on vacation, there is no schedule.” –Kelly Clarkson

9. “I always try to have a vacation.” –Sophia Loren

10. “Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It’s about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.” –Frank Gehry

11. “My best vacation is somewhere I could hide, somewhere warm, and not a lot of people around.” –Derek Jeter

12. “In matters of healing the body or the mind, vacation is a true genius!”–Mehmet Murat Ildan

13. “When I go on vacation, I leave my house in total order: bills paid, garbage out, no milk in the refrigerator, mail done, so that I can better negotiate what will await me.” –Judy Sheindlin

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

15. “I enjoy a good meal, a good vacation, or a good movie, much as anyone else would.” –Terence Tao

16. “A vacation is having nothing to do and all day to do it in.” –Robert Orben

17. “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” –Gustave Flaubert

18. “The sun and the sand and a drink in my hand with no bottom. And no shoes, no shirt, and no problems.” –Kenny Chesney, “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems”

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

20. “New York is like a vacation – no beach required.” –Seann William Scott

21. “Taking a vacation can actually increase the likelihood of getting a raise or a promotion.” –Shawn Achor

22. “A good vacation for me is going to warm weather. Being able to go outside, in the sun, hit the beach, play outside sports. Being active outside. Going swimming, hanging by the pool, having a couple drinks, having a couple of your close buddies around, and just having a blast.” –Rob Gronkowski

23. “I like to vegetate when on vacation given my busy schedule when I’m at work.” –Zac Posen

24. “Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us.” ―Maya Angelou

25. “When all else fails, take a vacation.” –Betty Williams

26. “I love my job only when I’m on vacation.” –Unknown

27. “An upcoming vacation gives us something to eagerly anticipate.” –Jaime Kurtz

28. “No one wants to die with vacation time on the books.” ―Andrea Goeglein

29. “The world is a book, and those who don’t travel only read one page.” –Augustine of Hippo

30. “The vacation we often need is freedom from our own mind.” –Jack Adam Weber

31. “Vacation is that time when you wish you had something to do while doing nothing.” –Frank Tyger

32. “Got my toes in the water, ass in the sand. Not a worry in the world, a cold beer in my hand. Life is good today.” –Zac Brown Band, “Toes”

33. “Don’t wait for a vacation to enjoy life. Start to enjoy it now, today, wherever you are.” ―Debasish Mridha

34. “Neglecting vacation is neglecting success because every success needs an accumulated positive energy!” ―Mehmet Murat Ildan

35. “A good vacation is over when you begin to yearn for your work.” –Morris Fishbein

36. “When all else fails, take a vacation.” ―Betty Williams

37. “When people went on vacation, they shed their home skins, thought they could be a new person.” –Aimee Friedman

38. “The average vacation is one-tenth playing — nine-tenths paying.” –Arnold Glasow

39. “My favorite place to vacation is anyplace by the ocean.” –Nina Arianda

40. “Don’t feel guilty about vacationing. What are you truly living and working for anyways? Death is all too real.” ―Richie Norton

41. “Travel brings power and love back into your life.” –Rumi

42. “Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.” ―Michael Palin

43. “Life’s short. Eat dessert first, work less and vacation MORE!” ―Lea Mishell

44. “Extend your vacation whenever possible.” ―A.D. Posey

45. “No, I didn’t get a thing done, but I sure soaked up every minute of the memory we were making, and I count it all as time well wasted.” –Brad Paisley, “Time Well Wasted”

46. “Happiness consists of living each day as if it were the first day of your honeymoon and the last day of your vacation.” –Leo Tolstoy

47. “Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.” –William James

48. “Read a lot when you’re on vacation, but nothing that has to do with your business.” –H. Jackson Brown, Jr

49. “Not every vacation is equal. And theory – the idea that vacations should increase happiness – doesn’t always translate to reality.” –Shawn Achor

50. “On vacation, you can wear all the colorful and casual clothing that you like, but you must always be elegant.” –Christian Dior

51. “A vacation is like love – anticipated with pleasure, experienced with discomfort, and remembered with nostalgia.” –Unknown

52. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.” –Benjamin Disraeli

53. “Laughter is an instant vacation.” –Milton Berle

54. “Vacation must be more than a word if it is meant to provide a total change of scenery and mindset. While it is recognized that the ideal vacation varies from person to person, or family to family, a vacation should always provide the absence of stress and regeneration of the spirit.” –Byron Pulsifer

55. “A vacation is a sunburn at premium prices.” –Hal Chadwicke

56. “Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.” —Peter Hoeg

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

58. “Off the Florida Keys, there’s a place called Kokomo. That’s where you want to go to get away from it all.Bodies in the sand, tropical drink melting in your hand. We’ll be falling in love to the rhythm of a steel drum band, down in Kokomo.” –The Beach Boys, “Kokomo”

59. “The ant is knowing and wise, but he doesn’t know enough to take a vacation.” –Clarence Day

60. “A wise man travels to discover himself.” –James Russell Lowell

61. “Love you to the beach and back.” —Unknown

62. “One-week vacations are too short to prevent burnout; by the time you relax enough not to think about the office the week is almost up.” –Cecilia Mikalac

63. “Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage.” —Paulo Coelho

64. “People don’t take trips; trips take people.” –John Steinbeck

65. “Be grateful for good friends, hot sun, and clear water.” —Unknown

66. “The more I traveled the more I realized that fear makes strangers of people who should be friends.” –Shirley MacLaine

67. “Travel expands the mind and fills the gaps.” —Sheda Savage

68. “I have never believed that vacations are luxuries. They are our necessities–just like shelter, clothes, and food, they make us feel like humans and not like animals that care only for survival.” –Alexander Babinets

69. “Vacations brighten a man. They tend to make his work more attractive to him and to make him more attractive to his work.”–Harry Van Demark

70. “An upcoming vacation gives us something to eagerly anticipate. It’s linked to a reduction in work- related stress and burnout as well as enhanced feelings of joy and interest. And travel can shape our personalities. When traveling for an extended period of time, desirable changes – increased openness to experience, emotional stability, agreeableness, and creativity – emerge.” –Jaime Kurtz, The Happy Traveler

71. “The longing to get away from it all never was so great as in our present time of tension and trouble. We want something to lift us out of the mess into which much of life seems to have fallen.”–Glenn Stewart

72. “Never take money in lieu of vacation time. Money will never give you what taking a break will give you.” –Catherine Pulsifer

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

74. “Neglecting vacation is neglecting success because every success needs an accumulated positive energy!” –Mehmet Murat Ildan

75. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”–Seneca

76. “Too much work, too much vacation, too much of any one thing is unsound.” –Walter Annenberg

77. “Holiday: A period of activity so intense that it can only be undertaken three or four weeks in the year.”–Miles Kington

78. “Trips and vacations are so much more. These experiences show you what’s possible and challenge you to examine the paths you’ll take in the future.” ―Blake Mycoskie

79. “A one day holiday can at times be better than a one-week vacation if you totally unplug for that one day!” ―Catherine Pulsifer

80. “Do not wait until you are dying to go on vacation. I think if I had to give you one piece of advice that would be it. We put things off. We do not mean to but we do. We carry around the assumption that there is plenty of time to do whatever needs to be done.” ―Marty Cauley

81. “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine; it is lethal.” ―Paulo Coelho

82. “Too much work, and no vacation/ Deserves at least a small libation/ So hail! my friends, and raise your glasses,
Work’s the curse of the drinking classes.” ―Oscar Wilde

83. “I’m gonna soak up the sun, I’m gonna tell everyone to lighten up. I’m gonna tell ’em that I’ve got no one to blame for every time I feel lame. I’m looking up.” ―Sheryl Crow, “Soak Up the Sun”

84. “The rainy days a man saves for usually seem to arrive during his vacation.”―Unknown

85. “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive disenchanted.” ―Japanese Proverb

86. “When you’re on a holiday, you can’t find the words to say all the things that come to you and I wanna feel it too.” –Weezer, “Island in the Sun”

87. “To travel is to live.” –Hans Christian Anderson

88. “Stuff your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.” –Ray Bradbury

89. “Think of life as a voyage. The truest liver of the truest life is like a voyager who, as he sails, is not indifferent to all the beauty of the sea around him.”–Phillips Brooks

90. “To get away from one’s working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one’s self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.” –Charles Horton Cooley

91. “The purpose of a vacation is to have the time to rest. But many of us, even when we go on vacation, don’t know how to rest. We may even come back more tired than before we left.” –Nhat Hanh

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

93. “Work, travel, save, repeat.” –Unknown

94. “It is a good thing for everyone who can possibly do so to get away at least once a year for a change of scene. I do not want to get into the position of not being able to see the forest because of the thickness of the trees.” –Franklin Roosevelt

95. “There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.”–Nelson Mandela

96. “Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.”–Henry David Thoreau

97. “I’m not wild about holidays. They always seem a ludicrously expensive way of proving there’s no place like home.” –Jilly Cooper

98. “Take me down to the paradise city where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.” –Guns N’ Roses, “Paradise City”

99. “A vacation is necessary.” –Unknown

100. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” –H. Jackson Browne Jr., PS I Love You

101. “We travel, not to escape life, but for life not to escape us.” —Unknown

102. “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.” —Ernest Hemingway

103. “If you have lost your clarity and purpose, a vacation is a great way to find it again.” —David Fuller

104. “A vacation should be just long enough for the boss to miss you, and not long enough for him to discover how well he can get along without you.” —Jacob Morton Braude

105. “A travel adventure has no substitute. It is the ultimate experience, your one big opportunity for flair.” —Rosalind Massow

106. “Take vacations, go as many places as you can. You can always make money, you can’t always make memories.” —Unknown

107. “I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.” –Susan Sontag

108. “I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.” –Caskie Stinnett

109. “It’s better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.” —Unknown

110. “I love places that make you realize how tiny you and your problems are.” —Unknown

111. “It isn’t how much time you spend somewhere that makes it memorable: it’s how you spend the time.” —David Brenner

112. “The word is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.” —St. Augustine

113. “As you grow older, you learn a few things. One of them is to actually take the time you’ve allotted for vacation.” –John Battelle

114. “You can fall in love at first sight with a place as well as a person.”–Alec Waugh

115. “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

116. “Find what gives you joy and go there.” —Jan Phillips

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

118. “The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.” —Sydney J. Harris

119. “A traveller without observation is a bird without wings.”—Moslih Eddin Saadi

120. “Those that say you can’t take it with you never saw a car packed for a vacation trip.” —Unknown

121. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” —Helen Keller

122. “Vacation calories don’t count.” —Unknown

123. “Vacations are a good thing. They give you a break from the routine and and let your mind and body get refreshed while you supposedly spend some time doing some activities that you don’t normally get to do. Vacations are also a bad thing. Why? Because they end.” —Jim Clark

124. “Remember that happiness is a way of travel – not a destination.” –Roy M. Goodman

125. “It’s not a trip or a vacation. It’s a second life.” —Unknown

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125 Vacation Quotes—Best Vacation Quotes

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