Top 456 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Louis Stevenson - Page 3

Life is not a matter of holding good cards

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

Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.

The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.

When Christ came into my life, I came about like a well-handled ship.

How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Up in the air and over the wall, Till I can see so wide, River and trees and cattle and all Over the countryside. Till I look down on the garden green, Down on the roof so brown- Up in the air I go flying again, Up in the air and down!

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.

Take care of each other.

Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a man who does not smoke.

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.

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

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

We should strive to go on in fortune and misfortune like a clock during a thunderstorm.

It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.

When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.

Sir, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.

If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.

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. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temparate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.

The essence of love is kindness.

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

It is one of the worst things of sentiment that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that what is spoken.

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

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!

Friends: People who know you well, but like you anyway. The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

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.

When the teeth are shut the tongue is at home.

To miss the joy is to miss everything.

I have resolved that from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.

Make up your mind to be happy.

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honorable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness-these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without which money can buy nothing.

We can only know others by ourselves.

I consider the success of my day based on the seeds I sow, not the harvest I reap.

And this shall be for music when no one else is near, The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! That only I remember, that only you admire, Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.

I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.

The spirit of delight comes in small ways.

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 man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.

Money alone is only a mean; it presupposes a man to use it. The rich man can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere. He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither patience to read nor intelligence to see.... The purse may be full and the heart empty. He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him ... he may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher.

Ice and iron cannot be welded.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate.

He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.

The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.

Live life to the fullest.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.

The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.

and he began to understand what a wild game we play in life; he began to understand that a thing once done cannot be undone nor changed by saying "I am sorry!

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

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I lay me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be: Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

You can kill the body, but not the spirit.

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

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.

When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.

A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation.