Stevenson's Attitude to Life: With Readings from His Essays and Letters

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T.Y. Crowell, 1901 - 43 páginas
 

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Página 30 - IF I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness; If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face ; If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not ; if morning skies, Books, and my food, and summer rain Knocked on my sullen heart in vain : — Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake...
Página 7 - What art thou afraid of? Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling ? Despicable biped ! what is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee ! Death ? Well, Death ; and say the pangs of Tophet too, and all that the Devil and Man may, will, or can do against thee. Hast thou not a heart ? canst thou not suffer...
Página 12 - All literature, from Job and Omar Khayyam to Thomas Carlyle or Walt Whitman, is but an attempt to look upon the human state with such largeness of view as shall enable us to rise from the consideration of living to the Definition of Life. And our sages give us about the best satisfaction in their power when they say that it is a vapour, or a show, or made out of the same stuff with dreams.
Página 12 - Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses? where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself has made her dwelling among men?
Página 3 - It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room. By all means begin your folio ; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.
Página 34 - 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.
Página 36 - I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I would learn to write.
Página 34 - There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
Página 10 - We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts - namely to live.

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