Quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson

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

You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.

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.

The untented Kosmos my abode,I pass, a willful stranger;My mistress still the open roadAnd the bright eyes of danger.

Under the wide and starry sky,Dig the grave and let me lie.Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he longed to be;Home is the sailor, home from sea,And the hunter home from the hill.

Whenever the moon and stars are set,Whenever the wind is high,All night long in the dark and wet,A man goes riding by.Late in the night when the fires are out,Why does he gallop and gallop about?

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

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

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

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

The obscurest epoch is today.

Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is—nor yet so good a Christian.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

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

In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way I have to go to bed by day.

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

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

Saints are sinners who kept on going.

The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.