Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

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

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

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

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

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.

This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still.

Dogs live with man as courtiers 'round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice ... to push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives.

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

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate.

My idea of man's chief end was to enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

Since hate poisons the soul, don't cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.

The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I lay me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be: Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

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.