Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Restlessness becomes a creed here, and Stevenson sells it with a sly grammatical trick: travel not “to go anywhere,” but “to go.” The destination gets demoted to a kind of bourgeois excuse. What matters is motion itself, the feeling of being unpinned from routine, identity, and obligation. In an era when travel writing often doubled as imperial inventory and moral self-improvement, Stevenson smuggles in a more modern appetite: experience as velocity, not acquisition.

The sentence structure does the ideological work. “Not... but...” rejects the usual justification, then the taut repetition (“to go... to go”) turns movement into its own argument. By the time we reach “The great affair,” travel has become almost spiritual, but pointedly secular: no cathedral, no monument, just the body in transit. It’s a romantic stance with a skeptical edge, implying that the stated reasons people give for traveling (education, culture, status) are cover stories for a deeper itch.

Context sharpens the intent. Stevenson was chronically ill and frequently in motion, writing essays like “Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes” and later crossing oceans in search of health and climate. For him, movement wasn’t a luxury; it was a strategy for living. The subtext is both liberation and avoidance: to keep moving is to keep possibility alive, but also to outrun stasis, sickness, and the narrowing scripts of Victorian respectability. Travel, here, isn’t tourism; it’s self-preservation disguised as philosophy.