To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive…

The words close “El Dorado”, one of the short essays collected in Virginibus Puerisque. Stevenson’s subject is desire: we never reach what we want, and that is our good fortune, because wanting keeps us alive. Only one wish is realisable on earth, “only one thing that can be perfectly attained: Death”. He then pictures mankind on the march towards its chimeras, sure that just beyond the next hilltop, “against the setting sun”, the spires of El Dorado will appear. Little do these toiling hands and unwearied feet know their blessedness, he says, and the essay ends on this sentence.

Stevenson wrote these papers in the late 1870s, before the novels that made him famous; the collection appeared in 1881. Its title, from Horace, means “for maidens and boys”.

The first half of the sentence is now a proverb in its own right, usually shortened to “It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive”; the second half, which gives the point, is generally dropped.

Virginibus Puerisque, “El Dorado”, 1881

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work