Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.

The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.

and he began to understand what a wild game we play in life; he began to understand that a thing once done cannot be undone nor changed by saying "I am sorry!

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as achievement?

Dogs live with man as courtiers 'round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice ... to push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives.

The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.

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.

A friend is somebody who loves us with understanding, as well as emotion.

Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said - On wings they are carried - After the singer is dead And the maker buried.

Nobody speaks of a beautifful view for 5 minutes

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

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

A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.

Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them.

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

Of what shall we be proud of if we are not proud of our friends?

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

Love- what is love? A great and aching heart; Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair

His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.

The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.

Don't ever confuse motion with progress.

The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die.

One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal Green - one more, and my bosom Feels new life with an ecstasy.

-I am not sure whether he's sane. -If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.

Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

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

All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.

And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.

Live life to the fullest.

Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.

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

There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.

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 obscurest epoch is to-day.

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

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.... Freedom is of the essence, because you should be able to stop and go on and follow this way or that as the freak takes you.... There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow to jar on the meditative silence of the morning.