Wit & Attitude Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson makes surrender sound less like defeat than like a final, earned exhale. “Lay my weapons down” isn’t just martial imagery; it’s the language of a lifelong campaign, the body turned soldier by time, work, illness, and moral strain. Stevenson, perpetually negotiating fragile health while producing adventure and essayistic self-scrutiny, knew that endurance can be both heroic and exhausting. He refuses the sentimental version of dying bravely; he insists on “thankfulness and fatigue,” a pairing that feels almost modern in its honesty. Gratitude doesn’t cancel burnout. It sits beside it.

The phrase “whatever be my destiny afterward” performs a careful agnosticism. Stevenson doesn’t posture as a believer cashing in virtue for certainty. He’s more interested in dignity than doctrine, and he builds it from social and familial continuity: “lie down with my fathers in honor.” That’s the real afterlife here, the one that survives skepticism: being folded back into lineage, memory, and reputation without disgrace. Honor is his chosen immortality, and it’s pointedly public, not purely spiritual.

Then comes the sly, self-aware coda: “It is human at least, if not divine.” He undercuts any grand metaphysical claim with a shrug that doubles as a thesis about courage. If transcendence is unavailable, there’s still decency; if divinity is unprovable, there’s still a way to exit the stage without lying about how tired you are. The sentence lands because it grants permission to be finite and still be worthy.