Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson’s line lands like a proverb that’s been through a novelist’s workshop: compact, funny, and faintly menacing. “Sows” and “reaps” borrows the moral machinery of agrarian wisdom, the kind that usually promises a clean karmic payoff. Then he swaps the expected harvest (regret, ruin, sin) for something stubbornly bodily: indigestion. The joke is the point. Hurry isn’t merely a character flaw; it’s a lifestyle that physically rebels, turning the gut into the court that hands down sentencing.

The intent is corrective without sounding sanctimonious. Stevenson doesn’t preach “slow down” in pious tones; he makes haste look ridiculous and self-defeating. By framing hurry as seed you actively plant, he shifts responsibility back onto the person who insists life can be rushed without consequence. The subtext is classically Victorian in its anxiety about modern tempo: industrial schedules, steam travel, punctuality-as-virtue. Stevenson lived in an era that treated speed as progress, then watched bodies and minds buckle under new rhythms. Indigestion was practically a cultural diagnosis of the 19th century - a respectable complaint that hinted at stress, overwork, and nerves without naming them.

What makes the line work is its sensory specificity. Indigestion isn’t tragic; it’s irritating, persistent, and hard to ignore. That’s the sting: hurry doesn’t always punish you with catastrophe. It punishes you with minor misery that accumulates - the daily burn of living faster than you can actually metabolize. Stevenson turns impatience into a meal you can’t digest, a modern warning wrapped in a wry stomachache.