Expat Life Motivational Quotes
What stage of expat life are you in? Are you dreaming about and planning to move abroad soon? Are you an expat now and having some hard days as you adjust to living in a foreign culture?
Maybe you’re like me and have repatriated to your home country after living abroad for several years. And I can’t forget my friends who are planning some long-term travel soon. You’ll be short-term expats too!
No matter what stage of expat living you’re in, there’s nothing better than a good quote to keep you motivated. Am I right?!
This week, I rounded up all my favorite expat and travel related quotes for you in one post. Be sure to send this to your family or friend if they’re planning to become an expat with you!
Happy quote hunting!
If you’re planning to move abroad or dreaming about becoming an expat, these quotes are just for you:
All you’ve got to do is decide and the hardest part is over.
- Tony Wheeler
Be the girl who decided to go for it.
- Anon
You’re never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream
- C.S. Lewis
It’s a bittersweet thing knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same.
- Sarah Turnbull
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing
- Helen Keller
Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.
- Andre Gide
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 the street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.
- Bill Bryson
My marriage too was being tossed about like a chair or lamp, but without any bubble wrap to cushion it from relocation bumps or breakage
- Robin Pascoe (A Moveable Marriage)
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people just exist.
- Oscar Wilde
May your adventures bring you closer together, even as they take you far away from home.
- Trenton Lee Stewart
The ideal place for me to live is the one in which it is most natural to live as a foreigner.
- Italo Calvino
If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.
- Jim Rohn
Are you out there in the world living as an expat looking for a good quote to help get you through the harder days? Check these out:
Sometimes carrying on, just carrying on, is a superhuman achievement.
- Albert Camus
Tough times never last but people do.
- unknown
Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations.
- unknown
So, here you are too foreign for home too foreign for here. Never enough for both.
- Ijeoma Umebinyuo
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.
- Patricia Marxell
Everyone smiles in the same language
- George Carlin
Find your own happiness wherever you are; it will stay with you wherever you go.
- Amanda Walkins
The loneliness of the expatriate is of an odd and complicated kind, for it is inseparable from the feeling of being free, of having escaped.
- Adam Gopnik
One of the benefits of being bicultural is simply the awareness that how you live is not the only way.
- Anna Campanella
Repatriation is a big part of expat life, even though you’re no longer living abroad. Repatriation may also be the hardest phase of expat life. If you’ve just repatriated to your home country, these quotes will probably resonate with you:
You get a strange feeling when you leave a place, like you’ll not only miss the people you love, but you miss the person you are at this time and place because you’ll never be this way ever again.
- Azar Nafasi
You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That’s the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.
- Miriam Adeney
I am all the places in which I’ve left my heart
- Marina Sofia
I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.
- Mary Radmacher
How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.
- Winnie the Pooh
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
- Nelson Mandela
It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same. Even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ready to go on a gap year or do some long-term travelling abroad? These quotes will get you ready for life as a nomad:
When overseas, you learn more about your own country than you do the place you’re visiting.
- Clint Borgen
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
- Clifton Fadiman
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
- Aldous Huxley
Travel opens your heart, broadens your mind and fills your life with stories to tell.
- Paula Bendfeldt
I haven’t been everywhere but it’s on my list.
- Susan Sontag
I love places that remind me how small me and my problems actually are.
- unknown
I know you found a quote that spoke to you! Let me know which one was your favorite down in the comments!
Now that you’re motivated and excited about expat life abroad, be sure to sign up to receive my packing checklist so you don’t forget to pack anything! And you’ll receive monthly encouragement from me to your inbox.
