Robert Louis Stevenson

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed that not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse.

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

In the other gardens_x000D_ _x000D_ And all up the vale,_x000D_ _x000D_ From the autumn bonfies_x000D_ _x000D_ See the smoke trail!_x000D_ _x000D_ Pleasant summer over_x000D_ _x000D_ And all the summer flowers,_x000D_ _x000D_ The red fire blazes,_x000D_ _x000D_ the grey smoke towers._x000D_ _x000D_ Sing a song of seasons!_x000D_ _x000D_ Something bright in all,_x000D_ _x000D_ Flowers in the summer_x000D_ _x000D_ Fires in the fall!

Do not forget that even as "to work is to worship" so to be cheery is to worship also, and to be happy is the first step to being pious.

And my heart springs up anew,_x000D_ _x000D_ Bright and confident and true,_x000D_ _x000D_ And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew.

I who all the Winter through,_x000D_ _x000D_ Cherished other loves than you_x000D_ _x000D_ And kept hands with hoary policy in marriage-bed and pew;_x000D_ _x000D_ Now I know the false and true,_x000D_ _x000D_ For the earnest sun looks through,_x000D_ _x000D_ And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.

Away with funeral music-set_x000D_ _x000D_ The pipe to powerful lips-_x000D_ _x000D_ The cup of life's for him that drinks_x000D_ _x000D_ And not for him that sips.

The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.

-I am not sure whether he's sane. -If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.

I love this quote uttered by the character Widget in The Night Circus. He credits it to Herr Thiessen but knows it is a literary quote by the another author. "Wine is bottled poetry

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils".

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?