Quotes By Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

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

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.

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.

Nothing made by brute force lasts.

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.

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

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.

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.