"Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill."

"Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain"

"My body which my dungeon is, And yet my parks and palaces: — Which is so great that there I go All the day long to and fro."

"There's just ae thing I cannae bear, An' that's my conscience."

"'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.'"

"It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity."

"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden and the family have to change their name."

"It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it."

"Man is not truly one, but truly two."

"The doom and burthen 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."

"All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil."

"Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were betrayed."

"Let anyone speak long enough, he will get believers."

"I have observed there are no persons so far away as those who are both married and estranged, so that they seem out of ear-shot or to have no common tongue."

"Thus in the best fabric of duplicity, there is some weak point, if you can strike it, which will loosen all."

"It is one of the worst things of sentiment, that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that which is spoken."

"Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is – nor yet so good a Christian."

"Hatred betrayed is hatred impotent."

"When we take our advantage unrelentingly, then we make war."

"There are double words for everything: the word that swells, the word that belittles."

"The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action."

"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."

"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."

"Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties."

"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."

"Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed."

"To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto."

"Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I ask, the heaven above And the road below me."

"The untented Kosmos my abode, I pass, a wilful stranger: My mistress still the open road And the bright eyes of danger."

"I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night."

"Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them."

"In the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens Quiet eyes."

"God, if this were enough, That I see things bare to the buff."

"Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate."

"Be it granted me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home!"

"And no doubt it is easy thus to circumvent a child with catchwords, but it may be questioned how far it is effectual. An instinct in his breast detects the quibble, and a voice condemns it. He will instantly submit, privately hold the same opinion. For even in this simple and antique relation of the mother and the child, hypocrisies are multiplied."

"Ice and iron cannot be welded."

"To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life; and perhaps only in law and the higher mathematics may this devotion be maintained, suffice to itself without reaction, and find continual rewards without excitement."

"The world was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions of men, all different from each other and from us; there's no royal road there, we just have to sclamber and tumble."

"The commonplaces are the great poetic truths."

"; instead, ."

"Keats, entirely a stranger to error, could believe that the nightingale enchanting him was the same one Ruth heard amid the alien corn of Bethlehem in Judah; Stevenson posits a single bird that consumes the centuries: "the nightingale that devours time." Schopenhauer — impassioned, lucid Schopenhauer — provides a reason: the pure corporeal immediacy in which animals live, oblivious to death and memory. He then adds, not without a smile: Whoever hears me assert that the grey cat playing just now in the yard is the same one that did jumps and tricks there five hundred years ago will think whatever he likes of me, but it is a stranger form of madness to imagine that the present-day cat is fundamentally an entirely different one."

"The writer of modern times who seems to us most like the "simple great ones gone," Robert Louis Stevenson, owes much of his excellence to his modesty in being subject to restraint and his good sense in burdening himself with no partial doctrines to expound."

"Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain."

""True success is to labor," you said./Though you died at forty-four,/who does more than what you did?/Making pages that would live so long... islands/as treasures.../human lives as treasures../you took a deep breath,/opened your packet of cheese and fruit, curled into/the words."

"Never had beauty been so forgotten; style was poisoned at the fount of thought by Carlyle, whose sentences were confused disasters like railway accidents, and by Herbert Spencer, who wrote as though he were the offspring of two Times leaders; among novelists only Robert Louis Stevenson loved words, and he had too prudent a care to water down his gruel to suit sick England's stomach."

"Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral."

"Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort."

"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."