Happiness Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson smuggles a moral lesson into a nursery-rhyme lilt, then makes it stick by sounding almost too simple to argue with. "The world is so full of a number of things" lands with childlike vagueness, a deliberately unspecific abundance that refuses the grown-up habit of inventorying what counts. He doesn't say the world is full of riches, or beauty, or virtue. It's just full. The phrase lets wonder do the work, implying that attention, not acquisition, is the scarce resource.

Then comes the sly hinge: "I'm sure". It reads like reassurance, but it's also a gentle dare. If happiness is this obvious, why aren't we living it? The line turns into a quiet indictment of adult dissatisfaction, of the way sophistication can harden into grievance. Stevenson uses certainty as a rhetorical provocation: you have to choose to see what he's pointing at.

The kicker is "happy as kings". He doesn't idealize kingship; he uses it as the era's shorthand for maximum privilege, then democratizes it. You don't need a crown to reach the emotional payoff of power and security; you need the capacity to be moved by what's already there. In late-Victorian Britain, with its expanding consumer culture and sharp class stratification, that move is pointed. It's not naïve escapism so much as a counter-program to status anxiety: a politics of perception dressed up as a children's verse, daring the reader to outgrow cynicism without outgrowing intelligence.