Love Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson sneaks a radical ethic into a sentence that looks like a comfort blanket. Love, for him, is not a halo but a harness: "we serve". The verb matters. It yanks romance and sentimentality down into the realm of obligation, reciprocity, and daily labor. In a culture that loves to treat love as private feeling, Stevenson frames it as social function - a kind of invisible civic work that gives shape to a life.

The pivot - "I should say" - is classic Stevenson: a small, conversational hedge that actually tightens the argument. He knows "indispensable" is an audacious claim; nobody is truly indispensable in the grand scheme. So he narrows the scale. Not indispensable to history, but almost indispensable to someone. That "almost" is doing moral heavy lifting, offering humility without surrendering the emotional stakes. The subtext is anti-heroic: you don't need a public legacy to matter, just a relationship that makes your absence felt.

Then comes the democratic gut-punch: "no man is useless while he has a friend". It's a rebuke to Victorian ideas of worth measured by productivity, status, or moral achievement. Stevenson, often sick and itinerant, wrote from the margins of robust, empire-confident masculinity; you can hear the personal plea underneath the aphorism. Friendship becomes a counter-economy where value isn't earned by conquest or output but conferred through mutual recognition. The line doesn't deny loneliness or failure; it offers a practical antidote: be bound to someone, and usefulness follows, not as a career, but as a human fact.