Stevenson, Robert Louis
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Stevenson, Robert Louis
There is no duty we so much underrated as the duty of being happy.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Duty
There is but one art, to omit.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Editing and Editors
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Desire
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Company
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Company
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Communication
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Business
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Churches
A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Idleness
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Compatibility
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Enemies
Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Failure
Quite minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Meditation
A friend is a present you give to yourself.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Friends and Friendship
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Fear
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Gardening and Gardens
No man is useless while he has a friend.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Friends and Friendship
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Goals
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Growth
The very flexibility and ease which make men s friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman s bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Friends and Friendship
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Friends and Friendship
I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it s good fun.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Life and Living
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Life and Living
Once you are married, there is nothing for you, not even suicide, but to be good.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Marriage
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Night
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Humankind
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Husbands
Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Marriage
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Lies and Lying
If a man loves the labor of his trade apart from any question of success or fame, the Gods have called him.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Labor
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Intelligence and Intellectuals
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Morality
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Truth
The obscurest epoch is to-day.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Present
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Money
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Politicians and Politics
Everyone lives by selling something.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Sales
Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Present
The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Men and Women
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Proverbs
He travels best that knows when to return. Middleton For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel s sake. The great affair is to move.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Travel and Tourism
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Speech
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel s sake. The great affair is to move.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Travel and Tourism
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Travel and Tourism
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Travel and Tourism
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Success
To make our idea of 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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Taboos
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 civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Travel and Tourism
The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Sin
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Consequences
The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Action
Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Action
Wine is bottled poetry.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Alcohol and Alcoholism
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Ancestry
Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Acceptance
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Consequences
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Death and Dying
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Action
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Books - Reading
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?
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Weakness
For God s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Youth
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.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Youth
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catch words.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Vocabulary
The world is full of a number of things, I m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
World