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

- Robert Louis Stevenson

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

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Wine is bottled poetry.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

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

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

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?

- 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

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

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

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

- Robert Louis Stevenson

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

- 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

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

- 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

The world has no room for cowards.

- Robert Louis Stevenson

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

- Robert Louis Stevenson