Quotes By Robert Louis Stevenson

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

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.

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.

He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.

It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

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

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

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

The world is full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

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.

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

You can kill the body but not the spirit.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

Everyone lives by selling something.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

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.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

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.

We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.

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

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

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.

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