If we are indeed here to perfect and complete our own natures, and grow larger, stronger, and more sympathetic against some nobler career in the future, we had all best bestir ourselves to the utmost while we have the time. To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.

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

Essay (1878-03), “Crabbed Age and Youth,” Cornhill Magazine, Vol. 38
    (Source)

Collected in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, ch. 2 (1881)