Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils light in your eyes flowers at your feet duties at your hand the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.

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

A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank not as a prophet but as an unteachable brat well birched and none the wiser.

Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.

Courage is the footstool of the Virtues upon which they stand.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

It is very nice to think The world is full of meat and drink With little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place.

Wherever we are it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else and whatever we do however well we do it it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.

Everyone lives by selling something.

By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

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.

There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine.