Because I have reached Paris, I am not ashamed of having passed through Newhaven and Dieppe. They were very good places to pass through, and I am none the less at my destination. All my old opinions were only stages on the way to the one I now hold, as itself is only a stage on the way to something else.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet

Essay (1878-03), “Crabbed Age and Youth,” Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 37
    (Source)

Collected in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, ch. 2 (1881).