“A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer
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.
