Robert Louis Stevenson

A Morning Prayer The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man; help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

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

The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

Things looked at patiently from one side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful.

Do not measure success by today's harvest. Measure success by the seeds you plant today.

I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.

Sing a song of seasons; something bright in all, flowers in the summer, fires in the fall.

There is but one art, to omit.

Courage, the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand.

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

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.

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

Of what shall we be proud of if we are not proud of our friends?

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

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.

If they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

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.

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