1850-1895, Scottish Essayist, Poet, Novelist
A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Idleness]
A friend is a present you give to yourself.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Friends and Friendship]
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Speech]
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Goals]
Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Present]
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Books and Reading]
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Ancestry]
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Humankind]
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Consequences]
Everyone lives by selling something.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Sales]
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Youth]
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 civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Travel and Tourism]
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Enemies]
He travels best that knows when to return. Middleton For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Travel and Tourism]
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Life and Living]
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Churches]
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Travel and Tourism]
If a man loves the labor of his trade apart from any question of success or fame, the Gods have called him.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Labor]
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say ''give them up,'' for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Morality]
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
Robert Louis Stevenson – [Husbands]