Success Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson takes the Victorian success ethic - hustle, moral accounting, the stiff upper lip dressed up as destiny - and flips it into something more mischievous and survivable. The line refuses the era's tidy equation of virtue with outcomes. "Our business" sounds like a ledger phrase, the language of duty and respectability, but he uses it to smuggle in a radically undignified mandate: keep failing, and do it cheerfully. The joke has teeth. He's not praising incompetence; he's puncturing the fantasy that a life can be audited into meaning by trophies.

The subtext is craft-level: for a working writer, "success" is intermittent and often external, while failure is constant, private, and instructional. Stevenson turns that reality into a philosophy of stamina. "Continue" is the tell. Persistence is framed not as a heroic march toward a goal but as an ongoing relationship with setbacks - the adult version of getting back up, minus the motivational poster.

"Good spirits" carries a double charge. On the surface it's mood management, a kind of self-governance that keeps despair from becoming identity. Underneath it's social strategy: if you're going to be publicly wrong, rejected, or unfinished, the only dignified posture is one that denies failure its favorite prize, which is your shame. Coming from a writer who lived with chronic illness and built whole worlds while his body limited him, the line reads less like pep talk than field report. It's permission to decouple worth from winning and to treat the self as a long project rather than a verdict.