A friend is a gift you give yourself.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.
Robert Louis Stevenson

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.
Robert Louis Stevenson


Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Everyone lives by selling something.
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Robert Louis Stevenson

He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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.
Robert Louis Stevenson