Top 100 Stevenson Quotes
#1. We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.
Bryan Stevenson
#2. You ultimately judge the civility of a society not by how it treats the rich, the powerful, the protected and the highly esteemed, but by how it treats the poor, the disfavored and the disadvantaged ...
Bryan Stevenson
#3. It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If
Kay Redfield Jamison
#4. 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
#6. In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed for every three hundred Americans; fifty years later, it was one bed for every three thousand.
Bryan Stevenson
#7. 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
#9. An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#10. What fools the public were! They were exactly like sheep ... thought Mr. Abbott sleepily ... following each other's lead, neglecting one book and buying another just because other people were buying it, although, for the life of you, you couldn't see what the one lacked and the other possessed.
D.E. Stevenson
#13. 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
#15. Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#16. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. I wouldn't ever presume to say that I am a comic book fan.
Ray Stevenson
#24. Really don't choose every day from the harvest you experience but from the seeds you plant
Robert Louis Stevenson
#25. 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
#27. I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time at university. And I started to notice then how unresolved some things were. Later, I realised that Stevenson was interested in sequels, and I wondered whether he would have gone back to it had he lived longer.
Andrew Motion
#28. We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.
Bryan Stevenson
#29. I don't know if kids still read it, I just know that for me - as a boarding school kid - the book had a lot of resonance. It was a well written book. I was honored to play a part in that movie version.
Parker Stevenson
#30. The mind is a storehouse with great capacity, but is often filled with dubious knowledge and meaningless trivialities. In truth, much of this - though at times interesting and entertaining - is of insignificant value.
Stevenson Willis
#32. There is something very appealing about a room which one occupied as a child; it brings back one's childhood more vividly than anything else I know.
D.E. Stevenson
#33. We must recover the element of quality in our traditional pursuit of equality. We must not, in opening our schools to everyone, confuse the idea that all should have equal chance with the notion that all have equal endowments.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#34. 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
#35. I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
Anne Stevenson
#38. 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. Thinking Reports enable the prisoners to wash their brains, and become new!" he announced cheerfully. "Washing the brain is very important to your reform, and improving your real situation.
Dominic Stevenson
#41. 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. The miracle of the Atonement can make up for imperfections in our performance.
Gary E. Stevenson
#44. ...I understood that even as we are caught in a web of hurt and brokenness, we're also in a web of healing and mercy.
Bryan Stevenson
#45. 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
#47. 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
#48. The man who has forgotten to be thankful has fallen asleep in life. Robert Louis Stevenson
Linda Dillow
#49. The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
(Adlai E. Stevenson, 1900-1965, American Lawyer, Politician)
Adlai E. Stevenson II
#51. Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#52. I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#53. It is often easier to fight for one's principles than it is to live up to them.
Adlai E. Stevenson II
#54. 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
#56. There were people in the South who were ardently opposed to slavery. And maybe, if we get into truth and reconciliation, those will be the people we want to name schools and streets after.
Bryan Stevenson
#57. All this grievin' is hard. We can't cheer for that man you trying to help but don't want to have to grieve for him, too. There shouldn't be no more killing behind this.
Bryan Stevenson
#58. Robert Louis Stevenson ... was a storyteller, that's what I'd like to be, that's what I'm trying to be
Quintin Jardine
#59. 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
#61. Keith Richards ... was once asked how he came up with all those amazing guitar riffs. His answer? He just starts playing until he makes the right mistake. In other words he's optimistic he will create something good by virtue of getting something "wrong."
Mark Stevenson
#62. I'd rather be useful than rich. It's more essential to feel you're doing something that's worth doing, rather than making a lot of money.
Juliet Stevenson
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#68. Since hate poisons the soul, don't cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#70. I say this thing about how I've never had to say my head is bloodied but not bowed, like everybody who came before me had to say. And that tells me that I can do a lot more than I think I can.
Bryan Stevenson
#71. In the 1960 campaign, Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Adlai Stevenson, who already lost twice as the party's presidential nominee, He has been away from power too long; he gives me an odd sense of unreality, a certain frivolity, distractedness, over-interest in words and phrases.
David Pietrusza
#72. heat stroke kills 80 percent of victims if left untreated.
Jason Stevenson
#74. Dying on some court schedule or some prison schedule ain't right. People are supposed to die on God's schedule.
Bryan Stevenson
#77. The woman who'd killed me was really starting to piss me off.
Sharon Stevenson
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. I might be dead, but that hasn't stopped me so far and it's not about to start now.
Sharon Stevenson
#82. 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
#83. Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#84. 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
#85. seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins
Robert Louis Stevenson
#86. As an actor, I love working with directors. As much as I love working with other actors.
Ray Stevenson
#87. If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.
Adlai E. Stevenson II
#89. Standards only move in one direction. At the beginning of the world, standards were established and they've been slipping ever since.
Edward Stevenson
#91. 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
#92. Plastic surgeons are not famous for their whimsicality. If they were, we'd all have faces like Valentino's. And cocks like Lyle's.
Richard Stevenson
#93. I know; I don't care to die either. But when whining mendeth nothing, wherefore whine?
Robert Louis Stevenson
#95. There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;
Robert Louis Stevenson
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