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There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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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.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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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 endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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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, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Acceptance
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Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Action(s)
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The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Adversity
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Even I, who had the tide going out and in before me in the bay, and even watched for the ebbs, the better to get my shellfish -- even I (I say) if I had sat down to think, instead of raging at my fate, must have soon guessed the secret, and got free. It was no wonder the fishers had not understood me. The wonder was rather that they had ever guessed my pitiful illusion, and taken the trouble to come back. I had starved with cold and hunger on that island for close upon one hundred hours. But for the fishers, I might have left my bones there, in pure folly. And even as it was, I had paid for it pretty dear, not only in past sufferings, but in my present case; being clothed like a beggar-man, scarce able to walk, and in great pain of my sore throat.
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.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped - Ch. 14 The Islet
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Alcohol/Alcoholism
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Wine is bottled poetry.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Ancestry, Ancestors
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Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Authors & Writing
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There is but one art, to omit.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Body, the
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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.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Business
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Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Civilization
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It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Communication
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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.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Company, Companions
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There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Consequences
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Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Conversation
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All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Death
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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.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
and the hunter home from the hill.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Requiem, (also used on Stevenson's Gravestone)
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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.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, from 'Aes Triplex'
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Deception/Lying
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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.
-Robert Louis Stevenson
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Books by and about Robert Louis Stevenson