Robert Louis Stevenson

“Fifteen men on the dead man's chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

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

“Doctors is all swabs...and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the doctor know of lands like that? — and I lived on rum, I tell you.”

“What is the Black Spot, Captain?" "That's a summons, mate.”

“Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!”

“Many's a long night I've dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly.”

“Them that die will be the lucky ones!”

“Every man has a sane spot somewhere.”

“In winter I get up at nightI have to go to bed by day.”

“A child should always say what's trueAt least as far as he is able.”

“Whenever the moon and stars are set,Why does he gallop and gallop about?”

“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.”

“The friendly cow all red and white,To eat with apple-tart.”

“The world is so full of a number of things,I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

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

“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.”

“Children, you are very little,And your bones are very brittle.”

“Of all my verse, like not a single line;Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!”

“Let first the onion flourish there,Of the capacious salad bowl.”

“Dear Andrew, with the brindled hairBy Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed.”

“Under the wide and starry sky,And the hunter home from the hill.”

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

“Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain”

“My body which my dungeon is,All the day long to and fro.”

“There's just ae thing I cannae bear,An' that's my conscience.”

“Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,And the road below me.”

“The untented Kosmos my abode,And the bright eyes of danger.”

“I will make you brooches and toys for your delightOf bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.”

“Bright is the ring of wordsWhen the right man rings them.”

“In the highlands, in the country places,Quiet eyes.”

“God, if this were enough,That I see things bare to the buff.”

“Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,Made my mate.”

“Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,Hills of home!”

“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.”

“Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.”

“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.”

“Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed.”

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

“REQUIEM”

“There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.”

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

“You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.”

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

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

“Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.”

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

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

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

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

“An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.”

“To forget oneself is to be happy.”

“A friend is a gift you give yourself.”

“The world is so full of a number of things, I ’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

“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 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.”

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

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

“Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.”

“Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.”

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

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

“Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.”

“You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.”

“Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great gar, others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings.”

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

“REQUIEM”

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

“Every man has a sane spot somewhere.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.”

“This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.”

“Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;”

“There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.”

“To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”

“Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.”

“Wine is bottled poetry.”

“Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.”

“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.”

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

“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

“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, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.”

“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.”

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

“In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.”

“Am I no a bonny fighter?”

“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.”

“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (…) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way.”

“Youth is wholly experimental.”

“Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is — nor yet so good a Christian.”

“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

“Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker.”

“Ice and iron cannot be welded.”

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

“So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”

“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.”

“Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.”

“Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.”

“All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.”

“There is but one art, to omit.”

“It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.”

“Already an old man, he [Samuel Johnson] ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea.”

“We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.”

“To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.”

“It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room.”

“By all means begin your folio; 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.”

“You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.”

“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. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.”

“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”

“The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?”

“Wine is bottled poetry.”

“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 time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life.”

“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.”

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

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

“The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.”

“Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?”

“It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.”

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

“Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough.”

“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.”

“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

“There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.”

“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”

“A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”