Robert Louis Stevenson
Scottish essayist, novelist and poet, 1850-1894
21 quotes.
Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson
- A friend is a gift you give yourself.
- A man must not deny his manifest abilities, for that is to evade his obligations.
- All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
- Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.
- Be what you are, and become what you are capable of becoming.
- Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
- Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.
- Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.
- 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 sickroom.
- To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
- Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things.
- 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.
- The bold may not live long, but the timid never live at all.
- The person who has stopped being thankful has fallen asleep in life.
- There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
- There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
- To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy for ever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.
- To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
- 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.
- To travel hopefully is better than to arrive.
- You cannot run away from a weakness; you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?