Quotes By Robert Louis Stevenson

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 one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

Nothing made by brute force lasts.

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

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

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

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.

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

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

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.

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.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

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

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

The obscurest epoch is today.

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

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

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

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

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

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.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

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.

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

Wine is bottled poetry.

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

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.