Robert Louis Stevenson
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.
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
Everyone lives by selling something.
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
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.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
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.
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
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.
The obscurest epoch is today.
I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
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.
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
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.
It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.
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.
If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
You can kill the body but not the spirit.
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
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.
Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
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.
He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.
No man is useless while he has a friend.
It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.
The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
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.
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.
Nothing made by brute force lasts.
We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
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.
Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?