“It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

"Reflections and Remarks on Human Life", VI: Right and Wrong, published in Works: Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson -- Sketches, Criticisms, Etc. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hwe7px (1895), p. 628. <br class="br">Context: It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect." by Robert Louis Stevenson?

Robert Louis Stevenson118

Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer 1850–1894

Related quotes

“One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.”

Kim Stanley Robinson book Green Mars

Source: Green Mars (1993), Chapter 6, “Tariqat” (p. 296)

“It is a peculiarity of time that in retrospect it appears so compact, an indivisible solid object, a dish with only one smell and one flavor.”

Cees Nooteboom book Rituals

Page 4
Rituals (1980)

“I am not good at noticing when I'm happy, except in retrospect.”

Tana French In the Woods

Source: In the Woods

“All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1860s <br class="br">Source: Letter to John Fraser http://www.bartleby.com/66/71/12271.html (1868)

“A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.”

Leo Tolstoy book War and Peace

Source: War and Peace

“A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his friends, and that the most liberal professions of good will are very far from being the surest marks of it.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to Major-General John Sullivan (15 December 1779), published in The Writings of George Washington (1890) by Worthington Chauncey Ford, Vol. 8, p. 139
1770s
Context: A slender acquaintance with the world must convince every man, that actions, not words, are the true criterion of the attachment of his friends, and that the most liberal professions of good will are very far from being the surest marks of it. I should be happy that my own experience had afforded fewer examples of the little dependence to be placed upon them.

“Action will happen in its own time. Action taken on strength of feelings inevitably leads to more feelings to correct the action previously taken - and so the feelings of discontent and conflict, and corrective actions go on and on repeating themselves.”

Barry Long (1926–2003) Australian spiritual teacher and writer

Love is not a feeling ~ The Article (1995)