Robert Stevenson Quotes

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

You can kill the body but not the spirit.

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

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

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

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

Nothing made by brute force lasts.

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

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

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

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

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

Don`t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.

The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

It`s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

We are all travelers in the wilderness of the World, and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.

Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

When I am grown to man`s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock in a thunderstorm.

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.

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

Every one lives by selling something.

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.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

I`ve a grand memory for forgetting.

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

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

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.

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.

So long as we love, we serve; 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.

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.

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

The world has no room for cowards.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

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.

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.

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.