Robert Louis Stevenson
142 quotes
Biography
"There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last."
"Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
"Nothing like a little judicious levity."
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well."
"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."
"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
"That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much."
"Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police."
"Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind."
"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."
"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."
"Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
"Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits."
"REQUIEMUnder the wide and starry skyDig 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."
"Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep."
"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy."
"An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils"."
"To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived."
"There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world."
"To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive."
"Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral."
"Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort."
"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."
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
"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, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye."