“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.
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.

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Robert Louis Stevenson 118

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

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