Best travel quotes for couples, sourced: who really said the lines you will caption
Fifteen travel quotes for couples from Twain, Stevenson, Whitman, Shakespeare, the Song of Solomon and Hemingway, each labelled with its book and year, plus the famous lines nobody can source.
Search for travel quotes for couples and page one is a wall of Pinterest pins: a soft-focus photo, a line in a script font, and almost never a book, a year or even a reliable name. A few of the most shared lines turn out to have no source anyone can find.
So this page does it the slow way. Every numbered line carries its writer, its book, the year and where in the book it sits, and every public domain line was read word for word in the original text. That gets you Huck Finn on what a journey reveals about the people beside you, Robert Louis Stevenson on his honeymoon in an abandoned silver mine, Walt Whitman holding out his hand, and the real story behind Hemingway’s rule about who to travel with. Then we take the famous unsourced lines one by one.
If you want love quotes with a travel flavour, our travel love quotes hub collects them. If you want captions, the couple travel captions for Instagram page is built for that. This one is about travelling as two, and the whole collection starts at the 100 best travel quotes.
What are the best travel quotes for couples? The 60 second answer
Travel quotes for couples, with the book and year
Start with the most honest line ever written about travelling with someone. It is not from a love story. It is Huck Finn, drifting over the Sahara in a balloon with Tom Sawyer and Jim in Tom Sawyer Abroad, Mark Twain’s short sequel. The book is in the public domain and free to read in full. More of his lines live on the Mark Twain travel quotes profile.
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.
Hemingway says it to his wife Hadley at a Paris cafe, straight after a miserable car trip to Lyon with Scott Fitzgerald. So the famous rule about love began as a verdict on a bad travelling companion, which makes it more useful, not less. The book is in copyright: we read the line and its context in a published excerpt of the chapter, not on the printed page, so the page is not confirmed.
A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway)
Best for: Couples planning Paris, or anyone who wants the whole Lyon story
Hemingway’s memoir of Paris in the early twenties with his first wife Hadley, published after his death. The chapter on Scott Fitzgerald holds the trip that produced the line above, and the rest is the best book there is about being young, broke and in love in a foreign city.
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Robert Louis Stevenson travelled alone through the Cevennes with a donkey called Modestine, and spent part of the trip wishing he were not alone. He married Fanny Osbourne in 1880, and their honeymoon was a camp in an abandoned mining bunkhouse on the slopes of Mount Saint Helena in California. Both books are free to read: Travels with a Donkey and The Silverado Squatters. His full profile is on the Robert Louis Stevenson travel quotes page.
I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Stevenson sleeping out under the pines in the Cevennes, happy with his own company and yet missing someone. The phrase solitude made perfect is the best definition of a good travelling partner we know.
And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free.
The very next sentence, and the one he is usually remembered for. Written by a single man on a solo walk, which is part of its charm: this is the trip he wanted to be taking.
There were four of us squatters—myself and my wife, the King and Queen of Silverado…
The honeymoon, as he chose to describe it: a dog, a stepson, a ruined bunkhouse and a royal title. The card stops where he moves on to the dog. If you want proof that a couple trip does not need a resort, this is it.
For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
From the essay that gives Virginibus Puerisque its name, his meditation on marriage. The dash is his. Read on a long trip together, it is less cynical than it sounds: the point is that the world keeps calling, married or not.
To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.
The same essay, a few pages on, and the funniest line in it. Every couple who has kept a shared travel journal will know exactly what he means.
The oldest invitations to travel together
Long before anyone wrote a caption, people were writing invitations to leave together. The oldest here are from the Song of Solomon in the King James Bible of 1611, followed by Shakespeare and Walt Whitman’s great poem of the road. All of it is public domain, and the Whitman is free to read in full.
Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.
The beloved’s call in spring, and still the best opening line for a trip proposal. The verses that follow are about winter being over and the flowers appearing.
Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages.
A later chapter, the same voice, and a plan for a slow trip: the fields, a night in the villages, up early for the vineyards. Very little about travelling well as a couple has changed.
Now go we in content / To liberty, and not to banishment.
Celia to her cousin Rosalind, deciding to run away together to the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. Not a couple, but the best line in Shakespeare about choosing your companion and calling the road freedom.
Camerado, I give you my hand! / I give you my love more precious than money, / I give you myself before preaching or law; / Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? / Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
The closing section of Song of the Open Road. Whitman first printed the poem in the second edition of Leaves of Grass in 1856 and kept revising it; the wording here is the final text. If you only read one line on this page aloud to someone, read this one.
Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!
From earlier in the same poem. Allons is French for let’s go, and Whitman uses it like a drumbeat.
On the person who goes with you
Not every great line about travelling together is romantic. Stevenson dedicated Travels with a Donkey to his friend Sidney Colvin, and Twain closed his first travel book with a word for the shipmates he had spent months beside.
We are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend.
From the dedication, before the journey even begins. Bunyan’s wilderness of this world comes from The Pilgrim’s Progress; the donkey is Stevenson’s own joke.
They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.
The same dedication, a few lines on, and the line for anyone travelling while someone they love is at home. Rarely quoted, and better than most that are.
And I will say, here, that I would rather travel with an excursion party of Methuselahs than have to be changing ships and comrades constantly…
Twain in the conclusion of The Innocents Abroad, on why he would keep the same travelling companions even if they were all ancient. The card stops mid sentence; the rest is about losing friends to diverging routes.
Who really said “It’s not where you go, it’s who you travel with”?
The honest answer: nobody has shown that Charles M. Schulz did. The line, usually as “In life, it’s not where you go, it’s who you travel with”, is credited to the Peanuts creator on quote sites, Pinterest boards, bookshop posts and Google’s own summary. Not one of the pages we checked names a strip, a date, a book or an interview. We have not searched every Peanuts strip, so we cannot say it never appeared; we can say that the people repeating it have never pointed to where.
Until someone produces the strip, treat it as attributed to Schulz, source unknown. That is why it is not a numbered card here. It is the same standard we apply across our travel quote fact-checks.
The famous couple travel lines nobody can source
“Traveling in the company of those we love is home in motion.” Credited to Leigh Hunt, the English essayist and friend of Keats and Shelley, on almost every list. The only source we found offered for it is a reference to his collected works of 1856, with no essay, chapter or page. We could not trace it to a named piece, so it stays unsourced. Hunt is a magnet for this: a far more famous line about losing sight of the shore is also pinned on him, which we untangled in who said you cannot discover new oceans.
“If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.” Usually labelled an African proverb. The folklorists Wolfgang Mieder and Charles Clay Doyle, who study proverbs for a living, found the English saying first in print in a 1917 speech by the businessman Cyrus McCormick, published in his company magazine The Harvester World, where it answers Kipling’s line “He travels the fastest who travels alone.” Mieder’s view is that the African origin is not supported, and when NPR looked into it in 2016 nobody could name the people it came from. There is a Luo proverb from East Africa with a related idea, about the young running fast alone and going far together with an elder, so the honest label is: the wording is American, the wisdom is widespread.
“A couple who travels together grows together.” Credited online to the Indonesian novelist Ahmad Fuadi. Every instance we found was a social media post repeating the same words with no book behind them, so it is not on this page. And the Elite Daily list on page one opens with “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page”, which we have checked separately: see did Augustine really say it.
Short travel quotes for couples
If you want something short enough for a caption, these are the tightest lines on the page, and each one still carries a name and a book: card 5, card 7, card 8, card 9, card 10 and card 12. The shortest of all is Stevenson on the Recording Angel, at eight words. For an even shorter cut, Whitman’s “Allons!” is a caption on its own. For ready-made captions with emoji and hashtags, the couple travel captions page has dozens.
Notes on the selection
How this page was built. Every public domain source was read in full as plain text from Project Gutenberg: Tom Sawyer Abroad, The Innocents Abroad, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, The Silverado Squatters, Virginibus Puerisque, Leaves of Grass (the 1891 to 1892 text) and the complete Shakespeare. The Song of Solomon verses are the King James text of 1611. Fourteen lines were matched against those texts word for word. The chapter, section, act or verse on each card is the nearest heading above the line in that text, so the locator is measured rather than remembered. Page numbers are left out on purpose: they change with every edition. Where a card stops mid sentence, the cut is shown, and verse line breaks are shown with a slash. Stevenson’s honeymoon chapter opens with a printer’s capitalised first word, which we set in normal case. The Hemingway card is the only one we could not read in its printed source, and it is graded on the card.
What was left out, and why. Schulz, Leigh Hunt and Ahmad Fuadi are discussed rather than quoted, because nobody has shown where they said those lines. Stevenson’s “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive” is real, from his essay El Dorado, but it already appears on our Stevenson profile and is about travel in general rather than travelling together. Twain’s line and Hemingway’s also appear elsewhere on this site; they are repeated here because they are the answers people are searching for. Nothing marked Unknown or Anonymous made the page, and song lyrics are not quoted.
Travel quotes for couples: the questions people actually ask
Who said “It’s not where you go, it’s who you travel with”?
It is credited to Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, but nobody repeating it has ever named a strip, a date or an interview. Until a source turns up, the fair label is attributed to Schulz, source unknown.
What did Mark Twain say about travelling with people?
“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” Huck Finn says it in chapter XI of Tom Sawyer Abroad, published in 1894.
What is a short travel quote for couples?
Three real options: “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away.” (Song of Solomon 2:10, King James Bible, 1611). “Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!” (Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road). “Never to go on trips with anyone you do not love.” (Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964).
Is “go fast alone, go far together” really an African proverb?
Not on the evidence so far. Proverb scholars Wolfgang Mieder and Charles Clay Doyle trace the English wording to a 1917 speech by Cyrus McCormick, written as a reply to Kipling’s “He travels the fastest who travels alone.” Similar ideas exist in African proverbs, but no one has shown this wording came from one.
Huck, after a night and a day floating above a desert caravan, deciding he liked them more the longer he knew them, just before a sandstorm takes them. It is the line every couple discovers on their first long trip: the journey is a test, and it works in both directions. It sits in chapter XI, not where most lists place it.