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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.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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Robert Louis Stevenson
Age: 44 †
Born: 1850
Born: November 13
Died: 1894
Died: December 3
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Songwriter
Writer
Edinburgh
Scotland
Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson
Robert Luis Stivensoni
Shih-ti-wen-sheng
Stivenson
Robert Loui Sitivensin
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
Robert Lui Stivenson
RL Stivenson
RL Stevenson
RLS
Mediocre
Mediocrity
Ambitious
Discourage
Pockets
Console
Generally
Discouraging
Wisdom
Conceived
Use
Pocket
People
Attempts

More quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

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If this is death, it is easier than life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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A proposition of geometry does not compete with life and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact both inhere in nature, neither represents it.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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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
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Cruel children, crying babies, All grow up as geese and gabies, Hated, as their age increases, By their nephews and their nieces.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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In the other gardens And all up the vale, From the autumn bonfies See the smoke trail! Pleasant summer over And all the summer flowers, The red fire blazes, the grey smoke towers. Sing a song of seasons! Something bright in all, Flowers in the summer Fires in the fall!
Robert Louis Stevenson
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Children are certainly too good to be true.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky It's time to take the window to see Leerie going by For every night at tea-time and before you take your seat, With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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To forget oneself is to be happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realised, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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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. It is so in every art and study it is so above all in the continent art of living well.
Robert Louis Stevenson