Wealth & Money Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Talk, Stevenson insists, is the one luxury nobody can gatekeep. Calling it "the most accessible of pleasures" is less a sentimental nod to conversation than a quiet rebuke to a culture that keeps confusing refinement with expense. He frames speech like a perfectly designed public good: free at the point of use, endlessly scalable, and available to the young, the old, the broke, the bedridden. That list is doing rhetorical work. By stacking clauses - "all profit", "completes our education", "founds and fosters our friendships" - he turns idle chatter into an engine of self-making, a claim that sounds obvious only if you forget how often talk is treated as disposable.

The subtext is moral and political. In a late-Victorian world obsessed with property, class markers, and purchased entertainments, Stevenson champions an intimacy that can't be stocked, inherited, or displayed. Conversation becomes a democratic art: anyone can participate, but only the attentive reap its "profit". That word choice smuggles in an ethic of return on investment, cleverly borrowing the language of commerce to argue against living by commerce.

There's also an autobiographical pulse. Stevenson spent much of his life in fragile health, moving climates and managing illness. "Almost any state of health" isn't ornamental; it's a reminder that the body can fail while the social mind remains agile. Talk, here, is not mere pastime but a portable form of freedom - a way to keep learning, belonging, and feeling alive when other pleasures are priced out or physically barred.