If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet

Essay (1888-12), “A Christmas Sermon,” sec. 2, Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 4
    (Source)

Originally written in the winter of 1887-88. Collected in Across the Plains, ch. 12 (1892).