816 Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.

The ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room.

But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetities, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.

To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory.

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.