174 quotes
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
Old Mortality (1884)
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882)
Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.
Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.
An Inland Voyage (1878)
Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is – nor yet so good a Christian.
The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
An appeal to his alarm is never a good plan to rid oneself of a spirited young man.
The New Arabian Nights (1882)
Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)
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.
Across the Plains (1892)
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect.
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception.
Across the Plains (1892)
There are double words for everything: the word that swells, the word that belittles.
The Master of Ballantrae (1889)
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.
The Silverado Squatters (1883)