Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert.

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
The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.

Robert Louis Stevenson
But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.

Robert Louis Stevenson
All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Away with funeral music-set
The pipe to powerful lips-
The cup of life's for him that drinks
And not for him that sips.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.

Robert Louis Stevenson
If they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiostiy, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only one undisturbed song of pure concent to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.

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
The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

Robert Louis Stevenson
So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.

Robert Louis Stevenson
But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetities, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!

Robert Louis Stevenson
Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

Robert Louis Stevenson
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,
Nor a friend to know me;
All I ask, the heaven above
And the road below me.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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