Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote suggests that it's better to be actively engaged with life's challenges through thought and theory than to passively accept everything without understanding.
Robert Louis Stevenson emphasizes the importance of awareness and critical thinking in the face of life's inconsistencies and difficulties. Rather than being complacently indifferent and accepting circumstances as they are, he advocates for a proactive approach where exploring ideas and theories can provide clarity and insight into our experiences.
Themes
TheoryAwarenessLifeEngagementThinking
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about embracing challenges, this quote can illustrate the need for critical analysis.
More from Robert Louis Stevenson
All quotes →Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
Similar quotes
The seventh day of creation is the most eloquent and insightful as to the nature of God. From a literary perspective, the Sabbath forms the pinnacle of the story. Like the dramatic kiss of a soldier returning from war, this is the moment we’re not meant to miss. In choosing rest as the grand finale, God reveals himself as one driven by neither anxiety nor fear but one who finds gladness in both the work of creation and the creation of work.
Margaret FeinbergRead
There are no private lives. This a most important aspect of modern life. That one of the biggest transformations we have seen in human life in our society is the diminution of the sphere of the private. That we must reasonably now all regard the fact that there are no secrets and nothing is private. Everything is public.
Philip K. DickRead
God is so big. It's a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we're small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.
BonoRead
Civilization has ceased to be that delicate flower which was preserved and painstakingly cultivated in one or two sheltered areas of a soil rich in wild species ... Mankind has opted for monoculture; it is in the process of creating a mass civilization, as beetroot is grown in the mass. Henceforth, man's daily bill of fare will consist only of this one item.
Claude Levi-StraussRead
The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs
Barbara EhrenreichRead
A rogue does not laugh in the same way that an honest man does; a hypocrite does not shed the tears of a man of good faith. All falsehood is a mask; and however well made the mask may be, with a little attention we may always succeed in distinguishing it from the true face.
Alexandre DumasRead