Words matter. These are the best Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
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.
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
No man is useless while he has a friend.
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.
It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.
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.
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
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?
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.
The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
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.
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.
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.
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.
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.
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
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.
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
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.
Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?
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.
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Everyone lives by selling something.
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.
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
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.
I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
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.
We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
To forget oneself is to be happy.
Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
The world is full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
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.
The world has no room for cowards.
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
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.
You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.
If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
You can kill the body but not the spirit.
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
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.
