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.
¶ "An Apology for Idlers" (1881)
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
¶ "Of Men and Books" (1882)
Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.
¶ "Reflections and Remarks on Human Life," sec. IV (1878)
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.
¶ "Truth of Intercourse" (1881)
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
¶ "Virginibus Puerisque" (1881)
No man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.
¶ Across the Plains, "The Lantern-bearers" (1892)
Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed.
¶ Across the Plains, ch. 12 "A Christmas Sermon" (1892)
Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.
¶ An Inland Voyage (1878)
So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
¶ Lay Morals and Other Essays, "Lay Morals," ch. 4 (1911)
Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is —- nor yet so good a Christian.
¶ The Master of Ballantrae. "Mr. Mackellar's Journey" (1889)
Many's a long night I've dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly.
¶ Treasure Island, ch. 15 "The Man of the Island" (1883)
