The soul and the body are one, and mostly so in love. What the body chooses, the soul loves; where the body clings, the soul cleaves; body for body, soul to soul, they come together at God’s signal; and the lower part (if we can call aught low) is only the footstool and foundation of the highest.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
“We are all such as He was—the inheritors of sin; we must all bear and bear and expiate a past which is not ours; there is in all of us—ay, even in me—a sparkle of the divine.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
“[The crucifix] stood there, crowning the rock, as it still stands on so many highway sides, vainly preaching to passers-by, an emblem of sad and noble truths: that pleasure is not an end, but an accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best to suffer all things and do well.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
Never before had I so realized the miracle of the continued race, the creation and recreation, the weaving and changing and handing down a fleshly elements. That a child should be born of its mother, that it should grow and clothe itself (we know not how) with humanity, and put on inherited looks, and turn its head with the manner of one ascendant, and offer its hand with a gesture of another, are wonders dulled for us by repetition.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
Lisa Marie Blair 