Quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson

There is no duty we underrate so much as the duty of being happy.

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outside conditions.

Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference.

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

We fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of fear and pain.

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

We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend

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

And every day when I've been good, I get an orange after food.

Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese - toasted, mostly.

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

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

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

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

A friend is a present you give to yourself.

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

So long as we love, we serve; 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.

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.