Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson serves morality cold, with a novelist's relish for delayed detonations. "Everybody, soon or late" opens like a shrug and lands like a sentence: no exemptions, no aristocratic loopholes, no heroic self-myths. The line refuses the comforting fantasy that consequences are optional, negotiable, or only for other people. It's not thunderous judgment; it's administrative certainty.

The genius is the banquet. Consequences aren't framed as a slap or a prison cell but as a meal you are made to attend. A banquet suggests abundance, ceremony, even a perverse hospitality: you helped set the table, you will be served. That metaphor also smuggles in time. Feasts are prepared, courses arrive in sequence, and you don't control the pacing. The damage (or reward) can take years to cook, which is exactly why people gamble on getting away with things. Stevenson punctures that gambler's logic by shifting the question from "Will it happen?" to "When will you sit down?"

In Stevenson's world - steeped in Victorian anxieties about respectability, vice, and the split between public self and private appetite - the subtext is pointed. This is the moral geometry behind stories like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: repression and indulgence are not opposites but collaborators, and the bill comes due either way. The phrase "banquet of consequences" also carries a sly, almost cynical edge: consequences aren't merely suffered; they're consumed. You live with what you do, metabolize it, become it.