Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Robert Louis Stevenson:
I've a grand memory for forgetting.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The world has no room for cowards.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Everyone lives by selling something.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The world is full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Nothing made by brute force lasts.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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To forget oneself is to be happy.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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?
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Nothing like a little judicious levity.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The obscurest epoch is today.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Wine is bottled poetry.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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A friend is a gift you give yourself.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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You can kill the body but not the spirit.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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No man is useless while he has a friend.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
~Robert Louis Stevenson
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