Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. (Click here for full Wikipedia article)
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After a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet.
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest-
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink
and the devil had done for the rest-
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
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.
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 travel not to go anywhere, but to go.
Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it: they are wrong.
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.
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.
Many's a long night I've dreamed of cheese- toasted mostly.
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.
Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is- nor yet so good a Christian.
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
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.
Ten thousand bad traits cannot make a single good one any less good.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
The price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign.
There is so much good in the worst of us, an so much bad in the best of us, that it behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us.
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.
To equip a dull, respectable person with wings would be but to make a parody of an angel.
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
Youth is wholly experimental.
Categories: Quotes of the day, Robert Louis Stevenson
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