Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson frames preference as a moral act, not a lifestyle choice. The line bites because it treats taste - what you like, what you reach for, what you refuse - as the last defensible territory of the self. In an age that loved improvement schemes and respectable consensus, he suggests the real danger is not sin but compliance: the cheerful, public-facing "Amen" that turns a person into a well-mannered echo.

The sentence is engineered around a sharp contrast. "To know" implies hard-won self-awareness, not impulsive contrarianism. "Humbly saying Amen" is the killer phrase: humility here is exposed as social theater, a performance of gratitude toward norms you didn't choose. Stevenson borrows religious language to indict a secular piety - the way society catechizes us into approved desires (the right ambitions, the right books, the right domestic arrangements) and rewards us for calling them our own.

"Kept your soul alive" lands with Victorian seriousness, but the subtext is practical. This is a writer who watched people outsource their interior lives to reputation, industry, and duty, and who made a career out of doubles and masks (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is basically a parable about what happens when the sanctioned self eats the rest). The intent isn't to romanticize selfishness; it's to defend an inner compass against the deadening force of "ought". Stevenson’s provocation is that integrity begins earlier than ethics, at the level of desire: if you can't name what you actually prefer, you're already halfway to being owned.