Top 100 Robert Louis Quotes
#1. It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If
Kay Redfield Jamison
#2. The teachers liked me. In grade school, they make you copy pictures from books. I think the first one was Robert Louis Stevenson.
Andy Warhol
#3. The man who has forgotten to be thankful has fallen asleep in life. Robert Louis Stevenson
Linda Dillow
#4. Robert Louis Stevenson ... was a storyteller, that's what I'd like to be, that's what I'm trying to be
Quintin Jardine
#5. Robert Louis Stevenson ... I'm focusing on the late short stories that I was ignorant of. I always thought he was a boys' author, but he's not at all.
Jane Birkin
#6. I agree with Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote, 'The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life'.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#7. My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
Terry Brooks
#8. In Robert Louis Stevenson's 'Jekyll & Hyde,' the hero decides on the terms of his transformation in a process that's explained not through the supernatural but the natural or, at least, through biochemistry.
Joshua Cohen
#9. I don't think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread - Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.
Ian Rankin
#10. The young demand joy like a right - the old only wish to be spared unbearable pain. Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
#11. Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences. Robert Louis Stevenson
Jessica Shirvington
#12. She quotes Robert Louis Stevenson about how young writers must read like predators. And she says that all of us, not just writers, must read like predators. For books are food, she said, for every single one of us.
Pete Hamill
#13. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Jorge Luis Borges
#14. The distinction between literary and genre fiction is stupid and pernicious. It dates back to a feud between Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James. James won, and it split literature into two streams. But it's a totally false dichotomy.
George R R Martin
#15. My three favorite travel writers of all time are Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, and Chuck Thompson. Smile When You're Lying not only tells the truth about the travel-writing racket, it gets to the heart of some of the travel industry's best-kept secrets.
Kinky Friedman
#16. I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
Louis L'Amour
#17. That reminds me of some fine advice from Robert Louis Stevenson: Keep your fears to yourself and share your courage with others.
Chris Pauls
#18. I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Francine Pascal
#19. 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
#21. The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#24. It offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#26. 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
#29. Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#30. The ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#31. Who's the best shot?" asked the captain.
Mr. Trelawney, out and away," said I.
Mr. Trelawney, will you please pick me off one of these men, sir? [Israel]Hands, if possible.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#32. Really don't choose every day from the harvest you experience but from the seeds you plant
Robert Louis Stevenson
#33. Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#35. Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#37. All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#39. looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard. "This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant
Robert Louis Stevenson
#42. It was high time, for I now began to be tortured with thirst. The glow of the sun from above, its thousandfold reflection from the waves, the sea-water that fell and dried upon me, caking my very lips with salt, combined to make my throat burn and my brain ache.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#44. I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#45. The HISPANIOLA still lay where she had anchored; but, sure enough, there was the Jolly Roger
the black flag of piracy
flying from her peak.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#47. And he began to understand what a wild game we play in life; he began to understand that a thing once done cannot be undone nor changed by saying I am sorry!
Robert Louis Stevenson
#49. It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#50. No man lives in the external truth, among salt and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied walls.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#51. With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night
That somehow the right is the right
And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:
Lord, if that were enough?
Robert Louis Stevenson
#52. A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#55. Since hate poisons the soul, don't cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#58. 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
#59. I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#60. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#61. Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#62. I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#63. seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins
Robert Louis Stevenson
#65. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#66. I know; I don't care to die either. But when whining mendeth nothing, wherefore whine?
Robert Louis Stevenson
#69. Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#70. In winter I get up at night,
and dress by yellow candlelight,
In summer, quite the other day,
I have to go to bed by day
Robert Louis Stevenson
#71. They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;
Robert Louis Stevenson
#73. You're either my ship's cook-and then you were treated handsome-or Cap'n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!
Robert Louis Stevenson
#74. 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
#75. When we look in to the long avenue of the future, and see the good there is for each one of us to do, we realize, after all, what a beautiful thing it is to work, and to live, and to be happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#76. You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#79. It is always a bad sign when the lower classes laugh: their taste in humour is both poor and sinister;
Robert Louis Stevenson
#80. There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand with startling blasphemies. Next,
Robert Louis Stevenson
#81. Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#82. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#83. 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
#85. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artis en life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#88. But I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#93. 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.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#96. But now that was all gone by, and had left her neither happier nor wiser; and the best she could do with her mornings was to come up here into the cold church and juggle for a slice of heaven.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#97. The San Francisco Stock Exchange was the place that continuously pumped up the savings of the lower classes into the pockets of the millionaires.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#98. The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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