Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850-1894) Writer and poet

Sourced

• In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
  • Stevenson's edition of Old Mortality (1884) [This is probably an edition of Walter Scott 's work in which this comment may have been part of an introductory note.]

• Under the wide and starry sky,
  dig the grave and let me lie.
  Glad did I live and gladly die,
  and I lay 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 the sea,
  and the hunter home from the hill.
  • Source: Underwoods (1887) Requiem (the final sentence was used on Stevenson's Gravestone)

• "Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is— nor yet so good a Christian."
  • Source: The Master of Ballantrae (1889) Mr. Mackellar's Journey

• If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice lest they spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
  • Source: Across the Plains (1892) Lay Morals

• In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.
  • Source: A Gossip on Romance (1882) included in Memories and Portraits - Chapter XV (1887)

Attributed

• Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

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

• The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.

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