You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.
Nothing made by brute force lasts.
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
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.
Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
The world has no room for cowards.
It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
To forget oneself is to be happy.
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.
The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.
There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
I've a grand memory for forgetting.
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
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.
You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.
To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.
All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.
I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.
Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.
It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.
Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
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.
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
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.
So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
You can kill the body but not the spirit.
The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.
