"If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong"
About this Quote
Stevenson is poking a needle into Victorian virtue, the kind that prides itself on being a little miserable. The line lands because it treats dreariness not as a noble side effect of morality but as evidence against it. That inversion is the trick: he reframes gloom as a diagnostic symptom. If your ethics require constant self-denial and performative solemnity, he implies, you are probably worshipping the wrong god - not goodness, but obedience.
The intent is less "be happy" than "stop confusing heaviness with depth". Stevenson wrote in an era that often dressed morality in starch and suspicion, especially around pleasure, art, and the body. In that cultural weather, cheer could look like moral failure, while dour restraint read as character. His jab undercuts that bargain. It argues for a moral imagination that enlarges life rather than shrinks it, a code that can survive sunlight.
The subtext is also defensive in a personal way. Stevenson lived with chronic illness and a reputation for writing adventure tales - a genre the gatekeepers didn’t always treat as Serious. He’s asserting that ethical seriousness doesn’t have to sound like a sermon or feel like penance. The sentence is built like a brisk verdict: "depend on it" carries the confident cadence of common sense, not theology. Morality, in his view, should produce vitality - not because pleasure is automatically good, but because a right moral compass shouldn’t point you toward joylessness as proof you’re on track.
The intent is less "be happy" than "stop confusing heaviness with depth". Stevenson wrote in an era that often dressed morality in starch and suspicion, especially around pleasure, art, and the body. In that cultural weather, cheer could look like moral failure, while dour restraint read as character. His jab undercuts that bargain. It argues for a moral imagination that enlarges life rather than shrinks it, a code that can survive sunlight.
The subtext is also defensive in a personal way. Stevenson lived with chronic illness and a reputation for writing adventure tales - a genre the gatekeepers didn’t always treat as Serious. He’s asserting that ethical seriousness doesn’t have to sound like a sermon or feel like penance. The sentence is built like a brisk verdict: "depend on it" carries the confident cadence of common sense, not theology. Morality, in his view, should produce vitality - not because pleasure is automatically good, but because a right moral compass shouldn’t point you toward joylessness as proof you’re on track.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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