Top 100 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
#1. As in all other places of resort, one type predominated: people in the prime of youth, with every show of intelligence and sensibility in their appearance, but with little promise of strength or the quality that makes success.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#4. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#5. Really don't choose every day from the harvest you experience but from the seeds you plant
Robert Louis Stevenson
#10. Must we to bed indeed? Well then,
Let us arise and go like men,
And face with an undaunted tread
The long black passage up to bed.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#11. I know; I don't care to die either. But when whining mendeth nothing, wherefore whine?
Robert Louis Stevenson
#12. To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not how we end, of what we want and not what we have.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#13. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#14. But besides that I was of an unforgiving disposition from my birth, slow to take offense, slower to forget it, and now incensed both against my companion and myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#22. A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#23. Call up your vermin to your back, sir, and fall on! The sooner the clash begins, the sooner ye'll taste this steel throughout your vitals.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#24. All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#25. Had be been Shakespeare, he would then have written Troilus and Cressidato brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#27. I incline to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#28. A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#29. We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#30. O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#32. Ah, said Silver, it were fortunate for me that I had Hawkins here. You would have let old john be cut to bits, and never given it a thought, doctor.
'Not a thought,' replied Dr. Livesey cheerily.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#34. Dogs live with man as courtiers 'round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice ... to push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#35. The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#37. It is nothing to get wet; but the misery of these individual pricks of cold all over my body at the same instant of time made me flail the water with my paddle like a madman.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#38. It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's endeavor springs in some degree from dulness. We require higher tasks, because we do not recognise the height of those we have.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#40. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#41. I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#42. We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#43. A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#44. Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#47. Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
And like the mandrake comes with groans.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#48. Hand-barrow - a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#49. My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It's time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at tea-time and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#51. When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#53. And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face ...
Robert Louis Stevenson
#54. AWAY with funeral music - set
The pipe to powerful lips -
The cup of life's for him that drinks
And not for him that sips.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#57. We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#58. It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#59. I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#61. Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#62. To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#64. I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#66. This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#67. There's never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a'terward - Long John Silver
Robert Louis Stevenson
#69. The woman who can manage, like the man who can fight, must never shrink from an encounter. The knight must not disgrace his weapons.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#73. It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity;
Robert Louis Stevenson
#74. Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is - nor yet so good a Christian.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#77. To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#78. So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#79. We now lay in towns, where nobody troubled us with questions; we had floated into civilised life, where people pass without salutation.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#80. And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#86. I wish you to judge for me entirely,' was the reply. 'I have lost confidence in myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#87. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views - amen, so be it. And
Robert Louis Stevenson
#88. There is nothing but God's grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#89. Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#91. The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#92. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#93. For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all impudences of the brawling world reach you no more.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#94. Scared by the thought , brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some jack-in-the-box of an old iniquity, should leap to light there.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#95. He was breaking his fast on white wine and raw onions, in order to keep up the character of martyr, I conclude.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#96. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#97. To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#99. And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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