Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson’s prayer doesn’t beg for victory; it begs for stamina. “Forbear and…persevere” is a double bind of survival: the restraint not to lash out, and the endurance to keep going anyway. It’s an ethic built for sickrooms, sea voyages, and the long weather of being human. Stevenson lived much of his life under the shadow of illness, and you can hear that biography in the sentence’s pacing: each clause arrives like a breath taken carefully, as if strength is a rationed resource.

The most revealing pairing is “courage and gaiety.” Courage is the virtue everyone applauds; gaiety is the one that’s harder to justify when life is grinding you down. Stevenson insists they belong together. He’s not romanticizing cheerfulness as denial, but treating it as discipline: the choice to keep one’s spirit from becoming another casualty. Then he sharpens the request into something almost modern in its psychological clarity: “the quiet mind.” Not a triumphant mind, not a brilliant one - a mind not colonized by panic, resentment, or the ceaseless internal commentary that turns hardship into identity.

“Spare to us our friends” acknowledges how contingent consolation is; friends aren’t guaranteed, they’re granted. “Soften to us our enemies” is the slyest line: it doesn’t ask that enemies disappear, only that their edges dull enough for coexistence. The subtext is pragmatic mercy. Stevenson is less interested in moral purity than in livability: a life where endurance is sustained by lightness, and conflict is managed by tempering, not conquest.