Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson smuggles a radical little claim into an aphorism that sounds almost Victorian-pious: life has one job, and it is self-realization. Not happiness. Not duty. Not salvation. The phrasing matters. "To become" is not a state but a process, a verb that refuses arrival. "Capable" adds a thorny constraint: he is not selling fantasy or grandiosity; he is talking about a latent range of powers that exist in you already, waiting to be enacted. That makes the line both bracing and quietly judgmental. If the only end is becoming, then stagnation is not just unfortunate - it is a kind of moral failure.

The subtext carries Stevenson’s own double vision. This is a writer who made adventure tales but was obsessed with inner conflict (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is basically an argument about how porous the self really is). In that light, "what we are capable of becoming" is not automatically noble. Capability includes temptation, violence, selfishness - all the selves we could grow into if we stop pretending we are singular. The sentence reads inspirational on a poster; in Stevenson’s world it has teeth.

Context sharpens it further. Late-19th-century Britain was busy assigning fixed identities: class, gender roles, empire, "respectability". Stevenson, chronically ill and restlessly mobile, lived like someone rejecting that trap. The line works because it offers a simple, almost stern counter-program: the point isn’t to fit; it’s to unfold, even if the unfolding is uncomfortable, even if it costs you social ease.