Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

In regard to tenacity of life, no old yellow cat has anything on a prejudice. You may kill it with your own hands, bury it deep, and sit on the grave, and behold! the next day it will walk in at the back door, purring.

Hearts may break, but hearts are the toughest of muscles, able to pump for a lifetime, seventy times a minute, and scarcely falter along the way. Even dreams, the most delicate and intangible of things, can prove remarkably difficult to kill.

Look who's standing if you please, 'though you tried to bring me to my knees.

It's very ugly' I said generously. 'But it looks as though it would laugh at snow. And, if you hit a deer it would hiccup, and keep going.

When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.

What fire does not destroy, it hardens

Be too dumb to quit and too stubborn to back off.

And I am an optimistic person. I guess if you want to try to find something to be pessimistic about, you can find it, no matter how hard you look, you know?

It is impossible not to be moved by the verve, courage and elan with Churchill attacked his last and ultimately invincible enemy, old age and infirmity. As in all his campaigns, he assailed his adversary with endless high spirits, expert advice, ample helpings of brandy and champagne, and the loving and long-suffering support of his wife.

There is a purpose to our lives, even if it is sometimes hidden from us, and even if the biggest turning points and heartbreaks only make sense as we look back, rather than as we are experiencing them. So we might as well live life as if - as the poet Rumi put it - everything is rigged in our favor.

Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.

I want to say that I cannot be intimidated or stopped. In order to put an end to various attempts to get rid of me as a possible candidate, I want to say that I'm running for president.

Change, even if unwelcome, forces us to reevaluate what our best options are. Those times of transitions are great opportunities to look for recurring patterns in your life and make adjustments to build on the good and reduce the bad.

There are people who are willing to suffer and swallow their tears at leisure, and God will no doubt reward them in heaven for their resignation; but those who have the will to struggle strike back at fate in retaliation for the blows they receive.

We are snared into doing things for which we get called names, and things for which we get hanged, and yet the spirit may well survive - survive the condemnations, survive the halter, by Jove! And there are things - they look small enough sometimes too - by which some of us are totally and completely undone.

There were a number of definitions of courage, but now I was seeing it in its simplest form: you do what has to be done day after day, and you never quit.

My countrymen should have nerves of steel, muscles of iron, and minds like thunderbolt.

There was always something. It's like with this one, there's always something that's mad that I look back on it and go, that's pretty amazing to say that I've done that or been there.

He was in his chair in the corner, resting a second before he came out for the next round -- in a long line of next rounds. The thing he was fighting, you couldn't whip it for good. All you could do was keep on whipping it, till you couldn't come out anymore and somebody else had to take your place.

I'm certainly dismayed by what I'm seeing now. There's a lot of ugliness of a kind I've never seen in my lifetime, or heard in my lifetime. But, look, I'm a romantic. I'm hopeful.

A philosopher is a man who can look at an empty glass with a smile.

She never inquired, but she never recoiled, either. This is a quality that I look for in a person, not recoiling.

Never react emotionally to what happens but always look for and find in every circumstance the good that's surely present there.

I guess just accepting failure is the thing. I don't really look at it as a failure. I look at them as learning lessons and things you grow from but not really a failure, because that's life.

When your spirit is alive, when somebody has got a strong spirit, they could be on the verge of death physically, and they'll leak out more life.