Happiness Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson takes a scalpel to the Victorian itch to police other people’s souls. The first sentence is politely barbed: “moral people” aren’t wicked, they’re busybodies with a halo, convinced virtue is something you can install in others like plumbing. His phrasing “an idea abroad” makes the impulse sound like a contagious fever moving through respectable society, not a noble mission.

The pivot is deliberately narrow: “One person I have to make good: Myself.” It’s a hard limit dressed up as humility, and it exposes the power play hidden inside moral reform. The would-be improver gets to stand as judge, define “good,” and claim the righteousness of intervention. Stevenson refuses that leverage. He’s not arguing that goodness doesn’t matter; he’s arguing that moral authority is easiest to exercise outward, where it costs you nothing.

Then comes the quieter provocation: duty to a neighbor is “much more nearly” about happiness. That hedge matters. Stevenson isn’t selling a saccharine, anything-goes hedonism. He’s pushing an ethic of restraint and care: if you can ease someone’s life without turning them into your project, that’s closer to decency than correcting their character. It’s liberalism with teeth, suspicious of sanctimony and alert to how moral campaigns so often smuggle in class, religion, and control.

In Stevenson’s late-19th-century world of temperance crusades and earnest reform societies, “make him happy if I may” is a radical downgrade of the moralizer’s job description: less conversion, more kindness; less certainty, more consent.