Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

Robert Louis Stevenson
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

Robert Louis Stevenson
For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

Robert Louis Stevenson
So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

Robert Louis Stevenson
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

Robert Louis Stevenson
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The world is so full of a number of things,
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

Robert Louis Stevenson
Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight,
The great artificer
Made my mate.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal. In all our veins there runs some…old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilized nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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
The untented Kosmos my abode,
I pass, a wilful stranger:
My mistress still the open road
And the bright eyes of danger.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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
Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.

Robert Louis Stevenson
And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

Robert Louis Stevenson
This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I lived on rum, I tell you. It's been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me. If I'm not to have my rum now I'm a poor old hulk on a lee shore, my blood'll be on you, Jim, and that doctor swab.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.

Robert Louis Stevenson