Robert Louis Stevenson quotes:

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

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.

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

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.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

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 habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

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.

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

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.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

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.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

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.

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

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.

To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.

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.

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

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 body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

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.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

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 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.

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave

Wild horses wouldn't draw it from you?

The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare. (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)"

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 fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.

There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulation; their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape.

As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.

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.

To love is the great amulet that makes this world a garden.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

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.

It blows a snowing gale in the winter of the year; The boats are on the sea and the crews are on the pier. The needle of the vane, it is veering to and fro, A flash of sun is on the veering of the vane. Autumn leaves and rain, The passion of the gale.

I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer made my mate.

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to another.

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.

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.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.

Nothing made by brute force lasts.

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way I have to go to bed by day.

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.

Faster than fairies, faster than witches, Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; And charging along like troops in a battle, All through the meadows the horses and cattle

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.

Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted mostly.

The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.

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.

Dogs live with man as courtiers 'round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice ... to push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives.

The friendly cow, all red and white, I love with all my heart; She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart.

I believe in an ultimate decency of things.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.

Saints are sinners who kept on going.

Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.

The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out to your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout your coming when you return from your daily victory and defeat.

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.

Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

O God! I screamed, and "O God! Again and again; for there before my eyes - pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death - there stood Henry Jekyll."

In the other gardens And all up the vale, From the autumn bonfies See the smoke trail! Pleasant summer over And all the summer flowers, The red fire blazes, the grey smoke towers. Sing a song of seasons! Something bright in all, Flowers in the summer Fires in the fall!

Sing a song of seasons; something bright in all, flowers in the summer, fires in the fall.

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.

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.

The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

We live thetime that a match flickers; we pop the corkof a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?

Loving God, help us remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men.

A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

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.

To make our morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret element of gusto.

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.

Love- what is love? A great and aching heart; Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference.

If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.

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.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.

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.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.

O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.