Robert Louis Stevenson
The physician...is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization.Collection: Flower
There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.Collection: Facts
The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.Collection: Science
For will anyone dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never seen an office, who says so.Collection: Office
I lived on rum, I tell you. It's been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me.Collection: Men
I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.Collection: Men
I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.Collection: Men
An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.Collection: Life
Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.Collection: Age
Give us courage and gaiety and the quient mind . . .Collection: Giving
There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.Collection: Depression
The only noble thing a man can do with money is to build a schooner.Collection: Men
There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.Collection: Art
We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable--not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.Collection: Together
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.Collection: Book
Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.Collection: Men
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.Collection: Travel
The obscurest epoch is to-day.Collection: Time
Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life.Collection: Love
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?Collection: Life
All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.Collection: Strong
A man met a lad weeping. "What do you weep for?" he asked. "I am weeping for my sins," said the lad. "You must have little to do," said the man. The next day, they met again. Once more the lad was weeping. "Why do you weep now?" asked the man. "I am weeping because I have nothing to eat," said the lad. "I thought it would come to that," said the man.Collection: Men
These are my politics: to change what we can; to better what we can; but still to bear in mind that man is but a devil weakly fettered by some generous beliefs and impositions; and for no word however sounding, and no cause however just and pious, to relax the stricture on these bonds.Collection: Men
By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.Collection: Get Well
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.Collection: Stars
There is no music like a little river's . . . It takes the mind out-of-doors . . . and . . . it quiets a man down like saying his prayers.Collection: Prayer
O wind, a-blowing all day long, O wind, that sings so loud a song!Collection: Song
Anyone can carry their burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do their work, however hard, for one day.Collection: One Day
A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.Collection: Men
But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetities, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.Collection: Death
To be honest...here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude...Collection: Life
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!Collection: Inspirational
I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.Collection: Jekyll
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.Collection: Evil
His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.Collection: Blood
I wish these flies would piss off.Collection: Wish
You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.Collection: Summer
Although I may express myself with some degree of pleasantry the purport of my words is entirely serious.Collection: Degrees
Happiness, eternal or temporal, is not the reward that mankind seeks, Happinesses are but his wayside companions. His soul is in the journey and in the struggle.Collection: Struggle
His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.Collection: Gratitude
All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.Collection: Writing
It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very foremost badge of modern civilization--the Urim and Thummim of respectability. . . . So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.Collection: Civilization
A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind.Collection: Color
Really don't choose every day from the harvest you experience but from the seeds you plantCollection: Harvest
We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers-Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building-had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjuct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic-that flatterer of credulity-the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision.Collection: Brother
I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.Collection: Believe
To be honest, to be kind-to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation-above all, on the same grim condition to keep friends with himself-here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.Collection: Life