Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson makes selfhood sound less like a possession and more like a project with teeth. The line pivots on a sly tension: “to be what we are” implies a baseline identity already present, while “to become what we are capable of becoming” admits that this “we” is unfinished, maybe even barely begun. He’s not offering the cozy modern mantra of “be yourself.” He’s demanding a double labor: honest recognition of one’s current nature and a disciplined push toward one’s unrealized range. The audacity is in calling that, and only that, “the end of life” - not pleasure, not status, not virtue-as-performance.

The subtext is quietly anti-Victorian. In a culture that prized propriety, respectability, and predetermined roles, Stevenson smuggles in a radical metric: fulfillment as growth, not compliance. Coming from a writer who lived with chronic illness and repeatedly escaped the expectations of class and profession (engineering, law, the dutiful Scottish son), the claim reads like self-justification sharpened into philosophy. It’s also a novelist’s credo: character is revealed by motion, not by labels.

The phrasing makes the argument feel inevitable. The repeated “what we are” works like a refrain, anchoring change to continuity so evolution doesn’t sound like betrayal. Stevenson’s trick is to frame ambition as fidelity: becoming more is not abandoning the self; it’s completing it.