Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
There is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Our mission in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in the best of spirits.

Robert Louis Stevenson
We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable—not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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 in a dark room.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

Robert Louis Stevenson
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is very nice to think
The world is full of meat and drink,
With little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place

Robert Louis Stevenson
Books were the proper remedy: books of vivid human import, forcing upon their minds the issues, pleasures, busyness, importance and immediacy of that life in which they stand; books of smiling or heroic temper, to excite or to console; books of a large design, shadowing the complexity of that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man... If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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
No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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
To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

Robert Louis Stevenson
An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils".

Robert Louis Stevenson