Robert Louis Stevenson

The commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions of men, all different from each other and from us; there's no royal road there, we just have to sclamber and tumble.

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without …

Ice and iron cannot be welded.

And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will instantly submit, privately hold the same …

To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.

Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.

the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and …

The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception.

There are double words for everything: the word that swells, the word that belittles.

When we take our advantage unrelentingly, then we make war.

Hatred betrayed is hatred impotent.

Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is – nor yet so good a Christian.

It is one of the worst things of sentiment, that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that which is spoken.

Thus in the best fabric of duplicity, there is some weak point, if you can strike it, which will loosen all.

I have observed there are no persons so far away as those who are both married and estranged, so that they seem out of ear-shot or to have no common tongue.

Let anyone speak long enough, he will get believers.

Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were betrayed.

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

The doom and burthen of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.

Man is not truly one, but truly two.