Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the beauty and strangeness of nature and suggests that writing can capture its essence with passion and vibrancy.
Robert Louis Stevenson reflects on the profound impact that nature has on human perception and creativity. He argues that the vivid and almost magical qualities of the natural world could be effectively conveyed through writing, provided that the writer captures it with enthusiasm and depth, instead of relying on dull or overly simplistic descriptions. This highlights the connection between artistic expression and the inspiring elements of our environment.
Themes
NatureWritingArtistryCreativityBeauty
In practice
Example use cases
During a nature writing workshop, I shared a quote by Stevenson to inspire participants to capture the essence of their surroundings.
More from Robert Louis Stevenson
All quotes →Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
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.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
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.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
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Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: 'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!'.
Pope John Paul IiRead
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
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I cannot speak for more than an hour exclusively about poetry. At that point, life itself takes over again.
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Perhaps the mission of an artist is to interpret beauty to people - the beauty within themselves.
Langston HughesRead
A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
Virginia WoolfRead