Robert Louis Stevenson

“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.”

“to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

“Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?”

“In this world of imperfection we gladly welcome even partial intimacies. And if we find but one to whom we can speak out of our heart freely, with whom we can walk in love and simplicity without dissimulation, we have no ground of quarrel with the world or God.”

“With our chosen friends, on the other hand, and still more between lovers (for mutual understanding is love’s essence), the truth is easily indicated by the one and aptly comprehended by the other.”

“But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey; and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend.”

“If you want a person’s faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge without change.”

“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.”

“He is not dead, this friend — not dead, But in the path we mortals tread Got some few, trifling steps ahead And nearer to the end; So that you too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.”

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”

“There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.”

“Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead of on two or three, you stake your happiness on one life only.”

“But still, as the bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it is more so on the other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is not every wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as Death withholds his sickle, you will always have a friend at home.”

“They will learn each other’s ways and humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may lean their whole weight.”

“The discretion of the first years becomes the settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives may grow indissolubly into one.”

“In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, climate, and ways of life, community of taste is to be sought for.”

“To dwell happily together, they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born with a faculty for willing compromise.”

“That people should laugh over the same sort of jests, and have many a story of “grouse in the gun-room,” many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale, is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things higher and better sounding in the world’s ears.”

“You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.”

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

“There is no hocus-pocus in morality; and even the “sanctimonious ceremony” of marriage leaves the man unchanged.”

“To marry is to domesticate the Recording Angel.”

“And goodness in marriage is a more intricate problem than mere single virtue; for in marriage there are two ideals to be realised.”

“It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than yours.”

“And ever, between the failures, there will come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.”

“Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.”

“Love should run out to meet love with open arms.”

“Indeed, 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.”

“This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing. It arrests the petrifying influence of years, disproves cold-blooded and cynical conclusions, and awakens dormant sensibilities.”

“They are half inclined to fancy it is because of them and their love that the sky is blue and the sun shines.”

“To do good and communicate is the lover’s grand intention. It is the happiness of the other that makes his own most intense gratification.”

“He wishes to be assured that he is not loved for this or that good quality, but for himself, or something as like himself as he can contrive to set forward.”

“I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit for you and me, Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.”

“And this shall be for music when no one else is near The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! That only I remember, that only you admire, Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.”

“There is our true base; that is not only the beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his boyhood.”

“The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out Through the blinds and the windows and bars; And high overhead and all moving about, There were thousands of millions of stars. There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree Nor of people in church or the Park, As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me, And that glittered and winked in the dark.”

“The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all, And the star of the sailor, and Mars, These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall Would be half full of water and stars. They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries, And they soon had me packed into bed; But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes, And the stars going round in my head.”

“The moon has a face like the clock in the hall; She shines on thieves on the garden wall, On streets and fields and harbor quays, And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees. The squalling cat and the squeaking mouse, The howling dog by the door of the house, The bat that lies in bed at noon, All love to be out by the light of the moon. But all of the things that belong to the day Cuddle to sleep to be out of her way; And flowers and children close their eyes Till up in the morning the sun shall rise.”

“Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature.”

“Do the stars rain down an influence, or do we share some thrill of mother earth below our resting bodies?”

“No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French happily put it, a la belle etoile.”

“The greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are themselves the most classical of poets.”

“One who has grown a long while in the sweat of laborious noons, and under the stars at night, a frequenter of hills and forests, an old honest countryman, has, in the end, a sense of communion with the powers of the universe, and amicable relations towards his God.”