The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: World, Happiness
The most influential books and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.—They repeat, rearrange, and clarify the lessons of life, disengage us from ourselves, constrain us to the acquaintance of others, and show us the web of experience, but with a single change.—That monstrous, consuming ego of ours struck out.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Fiction
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be the gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness, Self-Discovery
Courage is the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Courage
Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Marriage, Battle
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friendship, Friends, Friends and Friendship
The problem of education is two fold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Education
A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Mistakes, Failures, Career
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Night
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Books, Reading
To make our idea of 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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Superstition
The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right 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 in life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Gratitude, Blessings, Power, Work, Simplicity, Happiness
For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Youth, Time
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Husbands, Marriage
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyone should always have two books with him, one to read and one to write in.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Youth is wholly experimental.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Youth
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, nor a friend to know me; all I ask, the heavens above, and the road below me.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness
There’s no music like a little river’s … It takes the mind out of doors … and… sir, it quiets a man down like saying his prayers.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Wilderness
A friend is a present you give to yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friends and Friendship, Friendship
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
Topics: Death, Nature
We are all travelers in the wilderness of the world, and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Travel, Wilderness, Friendship
In this business it takes time to be really good – and by that time, you’re obsolete.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Business
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Intelligence
The existence of a man is so small a thing to take, so mighty a thing to employ.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Existence
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Simplicity
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
Topics: Death
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friend, Gift, Give
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Walter Scott Scottish Novelist
- J. M. Barrie Scottish Novelist
- Arthur Conan Doyle Scottish Writer
- John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir Scottish Novelist
- George MacDonald Scottish Poet, Novelist
- Tobias Smollett Scottish Poet
- Robert Burns Scottish Poet, Songwriter
- David Livingstone Scottish Missionary, Explorer
- Hugh Blair Scottish Minister, Scholar
- Samuel Rutherford Scottish Presbyterian Theologian
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