Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes on Life

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.

Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

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.

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

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.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

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

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

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.

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

You can kill the body but not the spirit.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.