"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."

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

"The reason for getting an education here—or anywhere else—is that it is better to be educated than not to be. It is better in and of itself. Not because it gets you something. Not because it is a mean…"

— Andrew Abbott

Sociology1948

#philosophy

"Religion, as embodied in the character and conduct of its disciples, cannot survive without doctrinal purity. In the absence of this element, religious feeling inevitably decays; while even religious …"

— John McClellan Holmes

Politics1834–1911

#life

"I am an agnostic as to the question of God. I think that it is impossible for the human mind to believe in an object or thing unless it can form a mental picture of such object or thing. Since man cea…"

— Clarence Darrow

Politics1857–1938

#mind