Quotes By Robert Louis Stevenson

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

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.

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.

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

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

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

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

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.

The world has no room for cowards.

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

So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

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

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

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

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

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

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

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.

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

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.