Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects a sense of acceptance and gratitude for one's life and legacy as one approaches the end of their journey.
In this quote, Robert Louis Stevenson expresses a profound acknowledgment of mortality and the emotions that accompany the end of life. He articulates a readiness to surrender, feeling gratitude for life's experiences and an honor in joining ancestors. This acceptance can be seen as a human trait that acknowledges both the inevitability of death and the potential for peace in embracing it.
Themes
MortalityGratitudeLegacyHonorDestiny
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a eulogy to celebrate someone's life and their contributions to others.
More from Robert Louis Stevenson
All quotes βLike 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
Similar quotes
No mariner ever enters upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born in the 20th century. Our ancestors know their way from birth through eternity; we are puzzled about the day after tomorrow.
Walter LippmannRead
A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.
Ralph Waldo EmersonRead
See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
Henry David ThoreauRead
Is it astonishing that, like children trying to catch smoke by closing their hands, philosophers so often see the object they would grasp fly before them?
Henri BergsonRead
We are an impossibility in an impossible universe.
Ray BradburyRead
All things are aggregations of atoms that dance & by their movement produce sound. When the rhythm of the dance changes, the sound it produces also changes... Each atom perpetually sings its song, and the sound at every moment creates dense subtle forms.
Alexandra David-NeelRead