Famous Quotes

Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

• Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
• All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.
• An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
• Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
• Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.
• Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
• Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
• For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
• If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
• 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.
• It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
• 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.
• 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.
• It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
• Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.
• Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
• Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
• Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
• Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
• Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.
• Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.
• 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.
• Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
• Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
• Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
• 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.
• 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.
• That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
• 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.
• The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.