Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door; Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shore Where neither piping bird nor peeping dawn Disturbs the eternal sleep, But in the stillness far withdrawn Our dreamless rest for evermore we keep.”

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

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

“The world has no room for cowards.”

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The obscurest epoch is today.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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've a grand memory for forgetting.”

“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.”

“The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.”

“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.”

“All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.”

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

“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.”

“Every man has a sane spot somewhere.”

“Nothing made by brute force lasts.”

“He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.”

“To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.”

“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 like a little judicious levity.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.”

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

“Everyone lives by selling something.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“REQUIEM 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 be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he long'd to be; Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.”

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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