Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.
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.
Friends: People who know you well, but like you anyway. The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.
Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert.
Love- what is love? A great and aching heart; Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair
Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, Wine-scented and poetic soul Of the capacious salad bowl.
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.
The San Francisco Stock Exchange was the place that continuously pumped up the savings of the lower classes into the pockets of the millionaires.
It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?
No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.
Happiness, eternal or temporal, is not the reward that mankind seeks, Happinesses are but his wayside companions. His soul is in the journey and in the struggle.
There is no music like a little river's . . . It takes the mind out-of-doors . . . and . . . it quiets a man down like saying his prayers.
A birdie with a yellow bill Hoped upon the window sill, Cocked his shining eye and said: 'Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-'ead?
You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others.
Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.
Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.
My idea of man's chief end was to enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.
It is not enough to be ready to go where duty calls. A man should stand around where he can hear the call!
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.
The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.
You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.
Whenever the moon and stars are set, Whenever the wind is high, All night long in the dark and wet, A man goes riding by.
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".
By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.
An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest blessings.
