To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.

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

Essay (1888-12), “A Christmas Sermon,” sec. 1, Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. 4
    (Source)

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