Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson doesn’t romanticize money so much as he demotes it. “Fortune” is the bait word: in Victorian Britain it usually meant cash, inheritance, security - the respectable finish line. He keeps the term, then quietly swaps the contents. The real jackpot, he argues, is purpose: an “aim” sturdy enough to organize your days and brave enough to survive disappointment. It’s a neat act of rhetorical smuggling, using the era’s favorite moral currency to buy something far less conservative.

The phrasing matters. Not “happiness,” not “success,” not even “virtue” - an aim. That’s lean, practical, almost muscular. Stevenson is pointing to direction rather than destination, the internal compass rather than the external prize. It’s also a defensive move against the period’s fetish for outcomes. If your worth is measured by what you accumulate, you’re always one market swing away from feeling like a fraud. An aim can’t be repossessed.

The subtext carries Stevenson’s own itinerant life: illness, travel, restless reinvention, a career built on adventure stories that are also disguised arguments for imagination. He knew how easily “fortune” becomes a trap dressed up as stability, how ambition without meaning curdles into mere status management. His line isn’t anti-wealth; it’s anti-misidentification. Get your aim first, and whatever else comes reads as bonus rather than proof of being alive.