[英國]羅伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森/Robert Louis Stevenson
羅伯特·路易斯·史蒂文森（1850-1894），英國小說家、散文家。生於愛丁堡，畢業於愛丁堡大學法律係，一生為肺病所擾，周遊各地養病，期間發表大量短篇小說和散文遊記。主要作品有小說《金銀島》、《化身博士》、《綁架》等。他的作品情節奇妙浪漫，文筆優美雅致。
It seems as if a great deal were attainable in a world where there are so many marriages and decisive battles, and where we all, at certain hours of the day, and with great gusto and dispatch, stow a portion of victuals finally and irretrievably into the bag which contains us. And it would seem also, on a hasty view, that the attainment of as much as possible was the one goal of man's contentious life. And yet, as regards the spirit, this is but a semblance. We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. There is always a new horizon for onward-looking men, and although we dwell on a small planet, immersed in petty business and not enduring beyond a brief period of years, we are so constituted that our hopes are inaccessible, like stars, and the term of hoping is prolonged until the term of life. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have. An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity. To have many of these is to be spiritually rich. To those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colors, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins. It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colors:it is they that make women beautiful or fossils interesting:and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure. Suppose he could take one meal so compact and comprehensive that he should never hunger any more;suppose him, at a glance, to take in all the features of the world and allay the desire for knowledge;suppose him to do the like in any province of experience-would not that man be in a poor way for amusement ever after?