50 Quotes About Studying Abroad | 2022 - A Broken Backpack (2023)

by Melissa Giroux | Last updated Mar 25, 2022 | Quotes, Travel Tips

Looking for inspirational quotes about studying abroad to motivate you to fill in your application form? We’ve created this list of 50 international student quotes, which you’ll love, whether you’ve yet to apply or you’ve been accepted and are counting down the days until your new life starts in another country.

If you’re simply considering studying abroad, by the end of these quotes, you’ll be convinced.

How To Use And Display Study Abroad Quotes

These quotes on studying abroad will ignite the spark for adventure inside you and have you fired up and ready to hop on a plane. To keep that momentum, there are many places you could display any of these quotes, some of which we’ll list here:

• Study folders and books
• Wall art
• Journals
• Mobile backgrounds
• Study planners
• Diaries
• Stickers
• Laptop backgrounds

Our recommendation is to display your favorite study abroad quote somewhere you’ll see it every day, where it can fill you with excitement and the itch to travel.

That said, you can find plenty of inspiring ideas on websites like Etsy.

50 Quotes About Studying Abroad

Let’s get into it. Here are 50 of the best and most inspiring study abroad quotes.

1. What we learn with pleasure we never forget. – Alfred Mercier
2. Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. – Neale Donald Walsch
3. 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
4. And then there is the most dangerous risk of all– the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later. – Randy Komisar
5. To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world – Freya Stark
6. You can never understand one language until you understand at least two. – Geoffrey Williams
7. Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world. – Gustave Flaubert
8. The benefits of studying abroad are almost endless. – Michelle Obama
9. The world is full of wonderful things you haven’t seen yet. Don’t ever give up on the chance of seeing them. – J.K. Rowling
10. Studying abroad is about experiencing a foreign country — and the most beautiful, important part of a country’s culture is its people. – Alexander Kolker
11. Cross-cultural learning and studying abroad can be transformative. – Amal Clooney
12. Traveling to a country is great, but to live in another country is truly amazing. – Brittany Watson
13. No one who has lived through the second half of the 20th century could possibly be blind to the enormous impact of exchange programs on the future of countries… – Bill Clinton
14. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. – Mark Twain
15. 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
16. Travel is still the most intense mode of learning. – Kevin Kelly
17. Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. – Terry Pratchett
18. And then I realized adventure was the best way to learn. – Unknown
19. The world is big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark. – John Muir
20. 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
21. 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
22. Travel is never a matter of money, but of courage. – Paolo Coelho
23. 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
24. Not all classrooms have four walls. – Unknown
25. If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go. – Anthony Bourdain
26. Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. – Nelson Mandela
27. I was surprised…by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility. – Jack Kerouac
28. I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a large scale. – F. Scott Fitzgerald
29. Never say ‘no’ to a life-changing opportunity. You will regret it. – Unknown
30. I think I’m quite ready for another adventure. – Bilbo Baggins
31. Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. – Mark Twain
32. Our homes are not defined by geography or one particular location, but by memories, events, people and places that span the globe. – Madilyn Gardner
33. So much of who we are is where we’ve been. – William Langewiesche
34. Traveling to another country is great. But living in another country… that’s truly amazing. – Brittany Watson
35. 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
36. The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost. To reach out eagerly without fear for newer and richer experiences. – Eleanor Roosevelt
37. Exchange isn’t a year in your life, it’s a life in a year. – Unknown
38. We have nothing to lose and a world to see. – Rainie Navarro
39. Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far they can go. – T.S. Elliott
40. The world is not in your books and maps, it’s out there. – J.R.R. Tolkien
41. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. – Lao Tzu
42. I knew very little about this place. I wanted to do something different, completely unknown and undone in my life. There was something there for me to discover. – John Outwater
43. Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here, nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life. – Colleen McCullough
44. Studying in a developing/third-world country is way more intense and formative than studying in a first-world fancy country. It makes you so much more open-minded, adaptive, and confident. You become so much more real. When you have to shit on two little bricks into a hole the size of a tennis ball at an elementary school in the countryside or sleep in a farmer’s yurt after not bathing for five days, you become a much more easygoing person. It teaches you to value experience over material things real fast. – Ali Wong
45. Do 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
46. If we were meant to stay in one place, we would have roots instead of feet. – Rachel Wolchin
47. I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world. – Mary Anne Radmacher
48. The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes. – Marcel Proust
49. There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. – Robert Louis Stevenson
50. Studying abroad is the single most effective way of changing the way we view the world. – Chantal Mitchell

Final Thoughts On Study Abroad Quotes

Are you ready to check out schools on the other side of the world yet? We hope these quotes about studying abroad have encouraged you to consider this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Need more inspiration? These travel poems will prove to you why traveling abroad is one of the most fulfilling ways we can fill our days.

Read one of the following blog posts to discover more inspiring travel quotes:

• Quotes about moving abroad
• Family travel quotes
• Eat Pray Love quotes