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

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

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

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

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis Stevenson

The world has no room for cowards.
Robert Louis Stevenson

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
Robert Louis Stevenson

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.
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

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Robert Louis Stevenson

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
Robert Louis Stevenson