Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.

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

His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.

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

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.

If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality.

To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artis en life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor.

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

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

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