"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."

Robert Louis Stevenson Literature See all quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson →

React to this quote

More by Robert Louis Stevenson

“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way.”

“For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.”

“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

“To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.”

“The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.”

“Sanity itself is a kind of convention.”

Resonant Thoughts

"We believe that Darwinism is the real Orthodox Church, because Darwinism asks you to believe in things unseen that are incredibly unlikely. Darwinism asks us to believe that out of pure random chance,…"

— Ben Stein

Politics1944

#life

"What is a neglected child? He is a child not planned for, not wanted. Neglect begins, therefore, before he is born."

— Pearl S. Buck

Literature1892–1973

#life

"This New Life is endless, and even after my physical death it will be kept alive by those who live the life of complete renunciation of falsehood, lies, hatred, anger, greed and lust; and who, to acco…"

— Meher Baba

Philosophy1894–1969

#life

"The earth had more oxygen in the past than it does now. Now you kids are going to be told in textbooks that the earth had no oxygen at the beginning, when life was evolving, called a "reducing atmosph…"

— Kent Hovind

Education1953

#life