Robert Louis Stevenson - Spirit Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

View all Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
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.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters... I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Between the possibility of being hanged in all innocence, and the certainty of a public and merited disgrace, no gentleman of spirit could long hesitate.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable—not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Our mission in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in the best of spirits.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulation; their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape.

Robert Louis Stevenson