Quotes from book
Virginibus Puerisque


Robert Louis Stevenson photo

“You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.”

Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1. http://books.google.com/books?id=Alw-AAAAYAAJ&q=%22You+could+read+Kant+by+yourself+if+you+wanted+but+you+must+share+a+joke+with+some+one%22+else&pg=PA17#v=onepage
Cornhill Magazine, (August 1876) http://books.google.com/books?id=VoNHAAAAYAAJ&q=%22You+could+read+Kant+by+yourself+if+you+wanted+but+you+must+share+a+joke+with+some+one+else%22&pg=PA174#v=onepage
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

Robert Louis Stevenson photo
Robert Louis Stevenson photo
Robert Louis Stevenson photo

“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, 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.

Robert Louis Stevenson photo

“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, Ch. 2.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself - erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life.

Robert Louis Stevenson photo

“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, Ch. 2.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

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