Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

“I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.”

“Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”

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

“That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.”

“You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?”

“Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.”

“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.”

“To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: -surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.”

“We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.”

“The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.”

“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 become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.”

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

“The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.”

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

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

“REQUIEMUnder the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he long'd to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,”

“Three,' reckoned the captain, 'ourselves make seven, counting Hawkins, here. Now, about honest hands?'Most likely Trelawney's own men," said the doctor; 'those he had picked up for himself, before he lit on Silver.'Nay,' replied the squire. 'Hands was one of mine.'I did think I could have trusted Hands,' added the captain.”