Robert Louis Stevenson: Thing

“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.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Virginibus Puerisque

Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 3.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: 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. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause. Two persons, neither of them, it may be, very amiable or very beautiful, meet, speak a little, and look a little into each other's eyes. That has been done a dozen or so of times in the experience of either with no great result. But on this occasion all is different. They fall at once into that state in which another person becomes to us the very gist and centrepoint of God's creation, and demolishes our laborious theories with a smile; in which our ideas are so bound up with the one master-thought that even the trivial cares of our own person become so many acts of devotion, and the love of life itself is translated into a wish to remain in the same world with so precious and desirable a fellow-creature.

Love , World , Thinking

“A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

Happiness

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book Songs of Travel and Other Verses

No. XXV, If This Were Faith.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)

God

“It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

People , Fools , Personality , Indifference

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book Underwoods

Bk. II, In Scots, My Conscience.
Underwoods (1887)