Quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson

He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.

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

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered.

To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire.

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for and the public curiosity is sure to welcome.

Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity,

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not how we end, of what we want and not what we have.

If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.

I hate to write, but I love to have written.

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 first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense.

He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches.

This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing.

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

I've a grand memory for forgetting.

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.