Robert Louis Stevenson Life Quotations

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

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.

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

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

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

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

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

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

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

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

The man is a success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.

I who all the Winter through, Cherished other loves than you And kept hands with hoary policy in marriage-bed and pew; Now I know the false and true, For the earnest sun looks through, And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as achievement?

Everyone lives by selling something.

If this is death, it is easier than life.

Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards

Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.

And my heart springs up anew, Bright and confident and true, And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

To be honest, to be kind-to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation-above all, on the same grim condition to keep friends with himself-here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.

Away with funeral music-set The pipe to powerful lips- The cup of life's for him that drinks And not for him that sips.

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.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

To be honest...here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude.

A great part of life consists of contemplating what we cannot cure.

Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.

Live life to the fullest.