Quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

The Saints are the Sinners who keep on trying.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catch words.

There is but one art, to omit.

Ah sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age.

For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

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

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

You can kill the body but not the spirit.

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.

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.

Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a man who does not smoke.

Loving God, help us remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men.

A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

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.

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

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

There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.

Dogs live with man as courtiers 'round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice ... to push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives.

If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife