Robert Louis Stevenson

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

You cannot run away from weakness you must some time fight it out or perish and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.

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

Wine is bottled poetry.

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.

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

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

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

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

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

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

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.

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.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

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