Daily Inspiration Quote by Margaret Oliphant

Oliphant skewers the pious Victorian idea that travel is automatically self-improvement, with museums as its mandatory religion. The line lands because it pretends to be casually reasonable while quietly detonating an entire middle-class script: go abroad, consume “culture,” return refined. Her speaker isn’t confessing philistinism so much as mocking the social pressure to perform appreciation on command. “That don’t trouble me” is the chilly brush-off of someone who knows the expected response and refuses to play along.

The joke sharpens in the escalation. Abroad, you “always” have to look at pictures and museums: not because you’re curious, but because the itinerary (and the companions) requires it. Art becomes a chore, a checkpoint, a moral exercise. Oliphant’s comedy is in treating aesthetic experience like a nuisance tax of mobility, an unavoidable surcharge on the passport.

Then she twists the knife: having to do it “at home” would be “beyond a joke.” The subtext is deliciously snobbish and pragmatic at once. Abroad, you can frame your boredom as part of the grand foreign package; at home, the same dutiful trudging would expose the performance for what it is - empty, self-congratulatory, and weirdly joyless. It’s also a swipe at the Victorian museum boom and the era’s belief in culture as public instruction. Oliphant implies that enforced edification doesn’t elevate the soul; it just manufactures a class of people fluent in the gestures of taste, and quietly miserable while making them.