Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Restlessness gets romanticized as ambition; Stevenson flips it into a philosophy. "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go" is a tidy rebellion against the Victorian obsession with destinations: colonies mapped, rail timetables standardized, progress measured in arrivals. He strips travel of its utilitarian alibi. No self-improvement agenda, no bucket list trophies, no moral lesson at the end of the road. Just motion.

The line works because it performs what it argues. Its mirrored phrasing ("to go anywhere... but to go") has the snap of a paradox, a sentence that keeps pivoting the way a traveler keeps turning corners. Stevenson frames movement as "the great affair", a deliberately inflated phrase for something that can look like mere wandering. That inflation is the point: he elevates the in-between moments modern life treats as waste - transit, detours, waiting - into the main event. The subtext is quietly anti-bureaucratic. When life is organized by schedules and goals, choosing movement for its own sake becomes a refusal to be managed.

Context matters. Stevenson lived with chronic illness and an acute awareness of the body's limits; motion, for him, isn't just leisure but a kind of proof of vitality. In an era selling stability as virtue, he argues for an identity made in flux. It's not escapism so much as a wager that the self is less a fixed address than a series of departures.