Nothing made by brute force lasts.
Meaning of the quote
This quote means that anything made by using too much force or power will not last for a long time. Things created with gentleness and care tend to be more long-lasting and successful. It's better to use thoughtfulness and patience instead of just trying to get something done quickly through sheer strength or force.
About Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson was a renowned Scottish writer known for classic tales like Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Despite suffering from poor health, he continued to write prolifically and travel widely, eventually settling in Samoa where his writing took on a darker realism. Though his critical reputation has fluctuated over time, Stevenson’s works are now held in high acclaim and he is one of the most translated authors in the world.
More quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
So long as we love, we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
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.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The obscurest epoch is today.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Everyone lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Nothing made by brute force lasts.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Nothing like a little judicious levity.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The world is full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
You can kill the body but not the spirit.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
To forget oneself is to be happy.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
If we take matrimony at it’s lowest, we regard it as a sort of friendship recognised by the police.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Wine is bottled poetry.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
No man is useless while he has a friend.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
I find it useful to remember, everyone lives by selling something.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The world has no room for cowards.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Every one lives by selling something.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
When I am grown to man’s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)
So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
Scottish novelist and poet (1850-1894)