Quotes about living abroad to inspire, offer comfort or help you reflect on the challenges and opportunities that come with residing in a different culture.
Adjustments of Moving Abroad
Moving to and living in a foreign country can feel like a whirlwind.
In the beginning, you struggle to find your essentials: your favorite spot for groceries, a reliable hardware shop stocking nails and a hammer, maybe an electronics store to replace your old appliances with new versions in the correct voltage.
The laundry list of moving is always long, but to do so in a new culture takes things to the next level.
At first, you find the challenge of navigating a new city and perhaps a new language exciting. The human brain loves novelty, after all.
But with time, the little things you didn’t have to think about before start adding up.
Unconventional errands, like where to purchase felt paper for an art project or how and where to get your car washed… wants and needs so quickly fulfilled at home suddenly involve a multi-step research and thought process to solve abroad. Motivation can waver.
The Visible Differences
Along with the increased mental calculations of living abroad, there’s also the physical, more outward differences, too.
Perhaps you’re in a city where no one looks like you. You feel like the odd man out or the black sheep each time you leave the house. Lingering stares, double takes… signs of curiosity from strangers.
Maybe you weren’t particularly self-conscious before, but abroad, you’re more aware of your physical presence than ever.
Overcoming Challenges
The beauty of living in another culture, though, is the evolution. These challenges and more are met and overcome through resilience you develop by living outside societal norms.
Living abroad, more than anything, teaches us to understand and accept just how many realities exist in this universe. How different attitudes, circumstances and experiences shape each person’s perspective and the way they interact with the world.
Living in a foreign land, you develop a keen sense not only of understanding but also empathizing with someone else’s perspective.
You become more aware of the ways your homeland shaped you, and others. You see your countrymen and the customs of home clearer than ever before. You acknowledge privileges that may have previously been overlooked.
Best Quotes About Living Abroad
As someone who has lived in four different countries now, I’m no stranger to the joys and challenges of living abroad.
Whether you’re dreaming of future plans or reflecting on the expat life you’re already living, I hope these quotes resonate and help you feel more supported on your journey.
Let’s get into it.
The Concept of Home
“Abroad, freed of the clutter and distractions of home, we see many things—especially our own people—more clearly and more tellingly than we would at home.” — W. Somerset Maugham
“Home is not merely the homestead, my house, my room, my garden, my town—but everything it stands for… To feel ‘at home’ is an expression of the highest degree of familiarity and intimacy.” — Alfred Schuetz, The Homecomer
Shaping Identity
“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, Night Train to Lisbon
“Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.” — Nicolas Bouvier
“That is the magic of travel. You leave your home secure in your own knowledge and identity. But as you travel, the world in all its richness intervenes. You meet people you could not invent; you see scenes you could not imagine. Your own world, which was so large as to consume your whole life, becomes smaller and smaller until it is only one tiny dot in time and space.” — Kent Nerburn, author
“Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.” — Anthony Doerr
“When overseas, you learn more about your own country than you do the place you’re visiting.” — Clint Borgen
On Growth
“Embracing diversity is one adventure after another, opening new paths of discovery that connect an understanding to caring, listening, and sharing with others who are different than ourselves.” — April Holland
“Probably the only thing one can really learn, the only technique to learn, is the capacity to be able to change.” — Philip Guston, artist
“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt
“May the space between where I am and where I want to be inspire me.” — Tracee Ellis Ross, actress
“One’s destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things.” — Henry Miller
On Travel
“If we consider how long mankind spent as wanderers, close to two million years, compared to how long we have lived in towns and villages, less than 20,000 years, it’s no wonder we feel like taking a trip every so often just for the fun of it. Wandering is in our DNA, much like the human fascination with fire.” — Craig Storti, Why Travel Matters
“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.” — Anthony Bourdain
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” — Pico lyer, author
On Repatriation
“Evenings and weekends I worked on re-Americanizing myself. I had half-forgotten how to live in my own country while I spent one fourth of my life blundering around Afghanistan. In my absence everything had changed just slightly—the slang, the food, the music, the clothes, the drugs, the etiquette or such potsherds that still remained of it… Coming home to this country… was like waking from a coma and seeing two moons in the sky.” — Charles McCarry, The Shanghai Factor
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