Robert Louis Stevenson

He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and …

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done …

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

The pleasant Land of Counterpane.

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker.

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

Youth is wholly experimental.

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have …

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.