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. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.

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

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

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