Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt humility.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish essayist, novelist, poet

Essay (1881), “Virginibus Puerisque, Part 2”
    (Source)

First published in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers, ch. 1, part 2 (1881).