Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis StevensonRead
When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.
Interpretation
Finding joy in your work brings you more than just financial rewards; it enriches your life overall.
This quote emphasizes the idea that when you engage in work that you enjoy, you gain much more than just monetary compensation. The toil becomes a source of health, happiness, and moral satisfaction, suggesting that fulfillment in work can lead to a well-rounded and prosperous life.
In practice
An architect might use this quote when presenting their design philosophy.
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
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.
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
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.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
We have too many high-sounding words, and too few actions that correspond with them.
Riches are a cause of evil, not because, of themselves, they do any evil, but because they goad men on to evil.
Those who desire to rise as high as our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic.
The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.
There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.