Robert louis stevenson quotes

Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy.

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

I know what happiness is, for I have done good work.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

I have resolved that from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards

Since hate poisons the soul, don't cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.

Don't ever confuse motion with progress.

Make up your mind to be happy.

It is one of the worst things of sentiment that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that what is spoken.

The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.

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?

Love- what is love? A great and aching heart; Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair

Things looked at patiently from one side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful.

Friends: People who know you well, but like you anyway. The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire.

For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all impudences of the brawling world reach you no more.

The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.

And this shall be for music when no one else is near, The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! That only I remember, that only you admire, Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.

Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.

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

Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a man who does not smoke.

Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.

In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.

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.

The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

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

A great part of this life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

Loving God, help us remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men.

When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.

Be what you are, and become what you are capable of becoming.

Money alone is only a mean; it presupposes a man to use it. The rich man can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere. He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither patience to read nor intelligence to see.... The purse may be full and the heart empty. He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him ... he may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher.

To miss the joy is to miss everything.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

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. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temparate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.

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

It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.

To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

The bold may not live long, but the timid never live at all.

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

Everyone lives by selling something.

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.

There is nothing but God's grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

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

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.

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

He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.

The person who has stopped being thankful has fallen asleep in life.

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

We can only know others by ourselves.

The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.

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

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

Take care of each other.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

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

Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die.

But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life.

To love is the great amulet that makes this world a garden.

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

Being happy enables you to be free from domination by the outside world.

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

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

When Christ came into my life, I came about like a well-handled ship.

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.

Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

Wine is bottled poetry.

A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation.

It is better to be a fool than to be dead.

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.

Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert.

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

There is but one art, to omit.

The man is a success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.

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

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.

In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I lay me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be: Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

A friend is somebody who loves us with understanding, as well as emotion.

To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honorable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness-these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without which money can buy nothing.

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.

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

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.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.

If you would grow great and stately, You must try to walk sedately.

Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, 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.

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.

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

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

I consider the success of my day based on the seeds I sow, not the harvest I reap.

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

To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not how we end, of what we want and not what we have.

Sir, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.

Do not write merely to be understood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood.

The spirit of delight comes in small ways.

Do not measure success by today's harvest. Measure success by the seeds you plant today.

And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.

The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

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.

Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.

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.

It takes hard writing to make easy reading.

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

The essence of love is kindness.

Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things.

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