Robert Louis Stevenson

Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Wine is bottled poetry.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

There is no duty we so much underrated as the duty of being happy.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

There is but one art, to omit.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

A friend is a present you give to yourself.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

No man is useless while he has a friend.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will. This is the verse you grave for me: 'Here he lies where he longed to be; Here is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

If a man loves the labor of his trade apart from any question of success or fame, the Gods have called him.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Once you are married, there is nothing for you, not even suicide, but to be good.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The obscurest epoch is to-day.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Everyone lives by selling something.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To make our idea of morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

He travels best that knows when to return. Middleton For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catch words.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

People are afraid of war and wounds and dentists, all with excellent reason; but these are not to be compared with such chaotic terrors of the mind as fell on this young man, and made him cover his eyes from the innocent morning.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Small is the trust when love is green In sap of early years; A little thing steps in between And kisses turn to tears. A while--and see how love be grown In loveliness and power! A while, it loves the sweets alone, But next it loves the sour.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Whether we like it, or don't There's a sort of bond in the fact That we all by one master were taught, By one master were bullied and whackt. And now all the more when we see Our class in so shrunken a state And we, who were seventy-two, Diminished to seven or eight.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Hail, guest, and enter freely! All you see Is, for your momentary visit, yours; and we Who welcome you, are but the guests of God And know not our departure.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Any overt act, above all, is felt to be alchemic in its power to change. A drunkard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that does not help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make and break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he was discouraged in the end.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury forever many aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is approached not only through the delights of courtship, but by a public performance and repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with him if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such august circumvallations.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Is the house not homely yet? There let pleasant thoughts be set: With bright eyes and hurried feet, There let severed friendships meet, There let sorrow learn to smile, And sweet talk the nights beguile.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

— Robert Louis Stevenson