Robert Louis Stevenson Quotations

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.

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.

It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

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.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

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

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

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.

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

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

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

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.

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

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

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

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

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?

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

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.

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

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

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

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.

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

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

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

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 civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

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

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

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.

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

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

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

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

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

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.

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

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

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

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

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

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

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

Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.

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

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.

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

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.

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

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

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

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

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

You can kill the body but not the spirit.

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.

So long as we love, we serve; 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.

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

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

No man is useless while he has a friend.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.

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

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

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

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

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

I consider the success of my day based on the seeds I sow, not the harvest I reap.

The world has no room for cowards.

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours...and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure.

So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.

In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.

A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

The essence of love is kindness.