Top 100 Stevenson Quotes
#1. It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If
Kay Redfield Jamison
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. The man who has forgotten to be thankful has fallen asleep in life. Robert Louis Stevenson
Linda Dillow
#5. 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
#6. Robert Louis Stevenson ... was a storyteller, that's what I'd like to be, that's what I'm trying to be
Quintin Jardine
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. I agree with Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote, 'The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life'.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#10. 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
#11. (Adlai Stevenson once said to Richard Nixon: If you stop telling lies about me I'll stop telling the truth about you.
Christopher Hitchens
#12. A strange species we are, We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty. If I wanted to destroy a nation, I would give it too much, and I would have it on its knees, miserable, greedy, sick.
John Steinbeck to Adlai Stevenson
John Steinbeck
#13. When I was in the Army, I read a book by Adlai Stevenson. He said law was as noble as saving a person's life. So at one point, I felt that way too.
William Sanderson
#14. When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson, if he was vice president there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy
Jack Ruby
#15. 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
#16. Mr. Stevenson has a degree alright-a PhD from the Acheson College of Cowardly Communist Containment.
Richard M. Nixon
#17. Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
Willa Cather
#18. 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
#19. Adlai Stevenson has a genius for saying the right thing, at the right time, to the wrong people.
Joe E. Lewis
#20. The young demand joy like a right - the old only wish to be spared unbearable pain. Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
#21. Everybody, sooner or later, sits down to a banquet of consequences. Robert Louis Stevenson
Jessica Shirvington
#22. Harvard Business School professor Howard Stevenson famously defined "entrepreneurship" as "the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.
Sophia Amoruso
#23. The sea has had Conrad and Stevenson and Masefield, but the mountains continue to defy the written word. We have climbed their highest peaks and crossed their most difficult passes, but still they keep their secrets and their reserve; they remain remote, mysterious, spirit-haunted.
Ruskin Bond
#24. I'm strictly for Stevenson. I don't dig the intellectual bit, but I'm telling you, man, he knows the most.
Elvis Presley
#25. Stevenson told the legionnaires that patriotism "is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. . . . For it is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.
Scott Farris
#26. I had no idea how Stevenson's cases would hold up under close scrutiny. But given what was at stake - nothing less than possible concrete evidence of life after death - weren't they at least worth a visit?
Tom Shroder
#27. I didn't want to be the typical teen idol. I didn't want to be Leif Garrett. I didn't want to be Shaun Cassidy, David Cassidy or Parker Stevenson. I wanted to do my own thing.
Willie Aames
#28. Aside from my son, no person has ever shown for me the gentle concern I knew from Governor Adlai Stevenson.
Mercedes McCambridge
#29. 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
#30. Once again Chile reduces us to what R. L. Stevenson called 'the virginity of senses' where words cannot match the impressions received.
Brian Keenan
#31. That's because it was Gage Stevenson, the epitome of my childhood and love life. That boy is irreplaceable.
Melissa M. Futrell
#32. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.
Jorge Luis Borges
#33. Technically, 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' was a kids' show, but adults watched almost religiously - and we're talking adult adults, celebrated adults - including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
Tom Shales
#34. 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
#35. Bill Stevenson of The Descendants is really good, too.
Travis Barker
#36. 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
#37. I loved 'Truly Madly Deeply' and all those 1990s romcoms because you had great actresses like Juliet Stevenson and Emma Thompson starting out.
Helen George
#38. Cartoons, often, that you do for the New Yorker don't appear for months afterwards, and the record for that is a cartoon that was bought by James Stevenson in 1987 and didn't appear until 2000.
Robert Mankoff
#39. I really learned how to write from Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Trollope, and de Maupassant.
Louis L'Amour
#40. That reminds me of some fine advice from Robert Louis Stevenson: Keep your fears to yourself and share your courage with others.
Chris Pauls
#41. I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Francine Pascal
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#49. An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#50. 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
#53. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I wouldn't ever presume to say that I am a comic book fan.
Ray Stevenson
#64. Really don't choose every day from the harvest you experience but from the seeds you plant
Robert Louis Stevenson
#65. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
Anne Stevenson
#77. All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. The miracle of the Atonement can make up for imperfections in our performance.
Gary E. Stevenson
#83. ...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
#85. 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
#87. Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.
Adlai E. Stevenson
#88. I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#89. It is often easier to fight for one's principles than it is to live up to them.
Adlai E. Stevenson II
#90. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
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