C.D. Warner, et al., comp. The Library of the World’s Best Literature.
An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.

Striving and Failing

By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894)

LIFE is not designed to minister to a man’s vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is,—so that to see the day break, or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys,—this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. “Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much,”—surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.

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