Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
— Robert Louis Stevenson
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
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?
The obscurest epoch is today.
No man is useless while he has a friend.
Wine is bottled poetry.
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
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.
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
Nothing like a little judicious levity.
If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Everyone lives by selling something.
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
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.
The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?
The world is full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
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.
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.
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.
The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.
Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
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.
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.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
