Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one.

If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.

His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

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

Give us courage and gaiety and the quient mind . . .

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

These are my politics: to change what we can; to better what we can; but still to bear in mind that man is but a devil weakly fettered by some generous beliefs and impositions; and for no word however sounding, and no cause however just and pious, to relax the stricture on these bonds.

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.

I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.

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.

Since hate poisons the soul, don't cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.

Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this [unlimited credit]: they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bondslave hopelessly grinding in the mill.

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.

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?

Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.

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

This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

Being happy enables you to be free from domination by the outside world.

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

If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.

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

He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

To love is the great amulet that makes this world a garden.

My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.

It is better to be a fool than to be dead. It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

To make our 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.

It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.

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

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.

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.

The man is a success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.

It is better to be a fool than to be dead.

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

Saints are sinners who kept on going.

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

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

Do not measure success by today's harvest. Measure success by the seeds you plant today.

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome.

To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honorable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness-these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without which money can buy nothing.

No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.

Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a man who does not smoke.

I love this quote uttered by the character Widget in The Night Circus. He credits it to Herr Thiessen but knows it is a literary quote by the another author. "Wine is bottled poetry