Life & Wisdom Quote by A. C. Benson

The line lands like a polite rebuke in a teacup: if you keep fleeing your life by swapping backdrops, the problem is probably still packed in your luggage. Benson’s phrasing is doing quiet, surgical work. “Very often” softens the blow, the way a well-mannered Edwardian might clear his throat before delivering bad news. It’s not an absolute; it’s a pattern. That restraint is part of the persuasion, implying lived observation rather than sermonizing.

The subtext is anti-escapist, but not anti-travel. “Change of scene” is the era’s respectable fantasy of renewal: the country air cure, the continental tour, the new posting, the fresh set of rooms. Benson suggests those rituals can become a moral loophole, a way of treating dissatisfaction as a logistical issue instead of an interior one. “Change of self” is the harder prescription because it demands agency, not geography; it also implies that the self is malleable, not fate.

Context matters: Benson lived in a late-Victorian/early-modern world where mobility was expanding for the educated class, while anxiety, melancholy, and spiritual drift were common subjects in letters and essays. The quote reads like counsel from someone who’s watched people outrun their own habits, only to find them waiting at the next station. Its intent isn’t to shame longing, but to redirect it: if you want a different life, you may need different reflexes, different attention, different character - not just different wallpaper.