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).