Famous Quotes By Robert Louis Stevenson

 

1. Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
2. All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.
3. An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
4. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
5. Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.
6. Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
7. Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
8. For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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.
12. I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
13. If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
14. In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
15. It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
16. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
17. 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.
18. 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.
19. It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
20. Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.
21. Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
22. Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
23. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
24. Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
25. Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.
26. Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.
27. 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.
28. Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
29. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
30. Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
34. 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.
35. The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
36. The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
37. The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
38. 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.
39. 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.
40. 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.
41. There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
42. To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
43. To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
44. We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
45. Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
46. 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.
47. Wine is bottled poetry.
48. 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.You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
49. 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?