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.

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

Essay (1880-01/02?), “Reflections and Remarks on Human Life,” § 6 “Right and Wrong”
    (Source)

A collection of aphorisms and musings, first published in the Edinburgh Edition of his Works, vol. 28 (1898).