To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. – Robert Louis Stevenson
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. – Robert Louis Stevenson
There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change. – Robert Louis Stevenson
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? – Robert Louis Stevenson
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. – Robert Louis Stevenson
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. – Robert Louis Stevenson
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well. – Robert Louis Stevenson
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits. – Robert Louis Stevenson
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords. – Robert Louis Stevenson
I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. – Robert Louis Stevenson
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. – Robert Louis Stevenson
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
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. – Robert Louis Stevenson
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life. – Robert Louis Stevenson
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. – Robert Louis Stevenson
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. – Robert Louis Stevenson
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. – Robert Louis Stevenson
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life. – Robert Louis Stevenson
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life. – Robert Louis Stevenson
