Education Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson takes a knife to the kind of “wisdom” that fits on a matchbook: tidy, repeatable, and designed to keep you in your place. “Pocket wisdom” sounds benign, even helpful, until he reveals its real function as social technology. These sayings aren’t neutral observations about life; they’re mini-regulations. They exist to manage disappointment in advance, to make risk feel gauche, to rebrand fear as prudence.

The sentence is built like a trapdoor. “Most of our pocket wisdom” starts with a communal “our,” implicating everyone who repeats a proverb to sound seasoned. Then he narrows the target: “mediocre people.” It’s not just an insult; it’s an exposure of audience. Mediocrity here isn’t lack of talent so much as a cultivated commitment to safety. The subtext is brutal: the world prefers you manageable. A culture stuffed with cautionary aphorisms (“don’t get above yourself,” “better safe than sorry”) doesn’t merely reflect reality; it actively produces it by shaming ambition as naivete.

Stevenson, a writer who made adventure and reinvention into serious art, knew how often creativity is policed by common sense. Late-Victorian respectability prized steadiness, propriety, and incremental progress; his line reads like a rebuttal to that moral furniture. Notice the double purpose he assigns to these maxims: discourage “ambitious attempts” and “console” people afterward. That’s the most damning part. The same slogans that talk you out of trying are waiting to pat you on the head when you don’t. He’s warning that easy wisdom is often just pre-packaged surrender.