Travel Love Quotes: Lines for the People Who Go Together
Every quote on this page is verified to its source, book and year. No Pinterest paraphrases, no borrowed signatures. Just the real words for travelling with someone you love.
Travel love quotes are usually where attribution goes to die. The lines get shared a million times, the names drift, and somewhere along the way a paraphrase becomes a tattoo. This page is the other way of doing it: the best travel and love quotes we can verify, each one sourced to a book and a year, organised by the feeling you are trying to put into words. Anniversary card, wedding reading, a caption for the photo of the two of you at the gate: it is all here, and it is all real.
If you want more once you have found your line, our love journey travel quotes collection goes deeper on the journey-as-relationship theme, and the couple travel quotes for Instagram list is built for captions.
The classics: love and the road
Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.
— Ernest Hemingway A Moveable Feast (1964) Verified primary source; published posthumously from his Paris years.
Hemingway’s one rule of travel is the shortest packing list ever written. The full chapter behind it is in our Ernest Hemingway profile, alongside his other verified lines.
To get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
— Mark Twain Following the Equator (1897) Verified primary source.
Twain wrote that one late in his life, on his last long journey. It is the quiet case for the window seat next to someone rather than the empty row to yourself. More of his verified lines live on the Mark Twain travel quotes page.
Vows and promises for travellers
Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.
— Ruth 1:16 King James Version The oldest travelling-companion vow in the canon.
Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.
— Robert Browning Rabbi Ben Ezra (1864) Verified primary source.
Come live with me and be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove.
— Christopher Marlowe The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (published 1599) Verified primary source.
Three lines that have been read at weddings for a very long time, and all three are really invitations to travel: go where I go, stay where I stay, come with me. If you are hunting for a reading, start here. The sources are old enough that nobody will fact-check you from the second row, but on this site we did anyway.
For the long haul
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.
— Sarah Williams The Old Astronomer (1868) Often misattributed to Galileo. The real author is the Victorian poet Sarah Williams.
Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you.
— Anthony Bourdain No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach (2007) Verified primary source.
These two are for the couples who have been doing this a while: the missed connections, the food poisoning in paradise, the year the trip did not happen. Bourdain’s line is about travel, and it is also about marriage, which may be why it gets read at both kinds of ceremonies. His full profile is in our Anthony Bourdain page.
Before you ink it: check the attribution
One warning from the people who verify these for a living. The much-loved line “We were together. I forget the rest.” is a paraphrase, not a verbatim Walt Whitman quote. The real line, from “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City” in Leaves of Grass (1860), reads “day by day and night by night we were together, all else has long been forgotten by me.” Beautiful either way, but if it is going on a wall or into a vow book, quote the real one and credit it honestly. The same habit applies everywhere: if a quote has a famous name but no book, chapter, or year attached, treat that as a warning. Every line in our 100 best travel quotes collection passed that test before it was published.
More couple travel quotes
Frequently asked questions
What is a good travel quote for couples?
The most quoted verified line is Ernest Hemingway’s “Never go on trips with anyone you do not love” from A Moveable Feast (1964). For something gentler, Mark Twain’s “To get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with” from Following the Equator (1897) reads beautifully on a card.
Who said “never go on trips with anyone you do not love”?
Ernest Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, his memoir of Paris in the 1920s, published posthumously in 1964. It is one of the most reliable attributions in the travel-quote canon.
What is a romantic quote about journeys?
Ruth 1:16 in the King James Version is the oldest travelling-companion vow: “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge.” Robert Browning’s “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be” from Rabbi Ben Ezra (1864) carries the same promise for the long haul.
Are the quotes on this page verified?
Yes. Every quote is checked against a primary source and carries its book or work and year. Where a popular version is actually a paraphrase, like the short Whitman line, we say so and give you the verbatim original.
Take the window seat together
The thing all seven of these writers agree on, across four centuries, is that the trip is better divided. If one of these lines names something you have been feeling about the person you travel with, that is the one to keep. Write it in the front of the journal, read it at the dinner, or just send it to them with no caption at all.