Robert Louis Stevenson on Love

"You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving."

"A man, Mr. Scrymgeour, may fall into a thousand perplexities, but if his heart be upright and his intelligence unclouded, he will issue from them all without dishonour."

"A woman loves to be obeyed at first, although afterwards she finds her pleasure in obeying."

"Already an old man, he ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea."

"The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities."

"People trifle with love. Now, I deny that love is a strong passion. Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living."

"The imagination loves to trifle with what is not."

"Time passes quickly with lovers."

"The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?"