We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable — not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomi… - Robert Louis Stevenson

It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.

'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.'

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.