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| Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend is a gift you give yourself. A friend is a present you give yourself.A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind. All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. and this is all life really means. Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life. Courage, the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand. Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably arboreal. Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences. Fifteen men on the dead man's chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum. (from 'Treasure Island') For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. 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. He who knoweth the precepts by heart, but faileth to practice them, is like unto one who lighteth a lamp and then shutteth his eyes. I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first. I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move. If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him. If we take matrimony at it's lowest, we regard it as a sort of friendship recognised by the police. 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 should spoil the lives of better and simpler people. It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. 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. It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect. Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant. Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords. 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. No man is useless while he has a friend.No man is useless who has a friend, and if we are loved we are indispensable. Nothing like a little judicious levity. Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own. Once you are married, there is nothing for you, not even suicide, but to be good. Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things. Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary. 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. 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. So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend. Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences. 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. The cruelest lies are often told in silence. 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. The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect. The obscurest epoch is today. The price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy. 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. The world has no room for cowards.The world is full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. 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. There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the world is wide, and so are morals. There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last. There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us. To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life. To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life. To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying "amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive. To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour. Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man. We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it. We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. 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. 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? |
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