Quotes by
Robert Louis Stevenson |
1850-1894 , Scottish writer
Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, most noted for writing “Treasure Island”, “Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and “A Child's Garden of Verses”. | 63 quotes | 1,924 visits |
Quotations
| • | Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul. 13 |
| • | Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy. 7 |
| • | Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits. 5 |
| • | Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary. 5 |
| • | That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much. 5 |
| • | Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. 4 |
| • | For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. 3 |
| • | I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. 3 |
| • | Do not write merely to be understood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood. 3 |
| • | Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. |
| • | 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. |
| • | To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life. |
| • | In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy. |
| • | Youth is wholly experimental. |
| • | Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man. |
| • | A good conscience is eight parts of courage. |
| • | There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs. |
| • | 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. |
| • | The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. |
| • | Old and young, we are all on our last cruise. |
| • | Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. |
| • | There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. |
| • | The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing. |
| • | The wine is bottled poetry. |
| • | Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. |
| • | Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well. |
| • | We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. |
| • | Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others. |
| • | The cruelest lies are often told in silence. |
| • | If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. |
| • | The saints are the sinners who keep on trying. |
| • | Make the most of the best and the least of the worst. |
| • | Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference. |
| • | All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. |
| • | We must go on, because we can’t turn back. |
| • | To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man. |
| • | Sightseeing is the art of disappointment. |
| • | Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow. |
| • | You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. |
| • | Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things. |
| • | The bold may not live long, but the timid never live at all. |
| • | It takes hard writing to make easy reading. |
| • | You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us. |
| • | The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. |
| • | The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek. |
| • | There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. |
| • | Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer. |
| • | The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty. |
| • | A friend is a gift you give yourself. |
| • | We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented. |
| • | 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 the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect. |
| • | No man is useless while he has a friend. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses. |
| • | There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. |
| • | We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it. |
| • | To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life. |
| • | The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. |
| • | To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity. |
| • | To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life. |
| • | Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality. |
| • | Curiosity and timidity fought a long battle in his heart. |
