There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.
Robert Louis Stevenson

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
Robert Louis Stevenson

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
Robert Louis Stevenson

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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

To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.
Robert Louis Stevenson

To forget oneself is to be happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
Robert Louis Stevenson

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
Robert Louis Stevenson

We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
Robert Louis Stevenson

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.
Robert Louis Stevenson

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.
Robert Louis Stevenson

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.
Robert Louis Stevenson

Wine is bottled poetry.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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.
Robert Louis Stevenson