Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!

Robert Louis Stevenson
Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a man who does not smoke.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Nature, the great Moloch, which exacts a frightful tax of human blood, sparing neither young nor old; taking the child from the cradle, the mother from her babe, and the father from the family.

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
Now, to be properly enjoyed, a walking tour should be gone upon alone.... Freedom is of the essence, because you should be able to stop and go on and follow this way or that as the freak takes you.... There should be no cackle of voices at your elbow to jar on the meditative silence of the morning.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The engineer was not only exposed to the hazards of the sea; he must often ford his way by land to remote and scarce accessible places, beyond reach of the mail or the post-chaise, even the tracery of the bridle-path, and guided by natives across bog and heather.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

Robert Louis Stevenson
You have your little handful of facts, little bits of a puzzle, and you sit and think, and fit 'em together this way and that, and get up and throw 'em down, and say damn, and go out for a walk.

Robert Louis Stevenson
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.

Robert Louis Stevenson
A man met a lad weeping. "What do you weep for?" he asked. "I am weeping for my sins," said the lad. "You must have little to do," said the man. The next day, they met again. Once more the lad was weeping. "Why do you weep now?" asked the man. "I am weeping because I have nothing to eat," said the lad. "I thought it would come to that," said the man.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this [unlimited credit]: they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bondslave hopelessly grinding in the mill.

Robert Louis Stevenson
He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I'm sure--
Or else his dear Papa is poor.

Robert Louis Stevenson
You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese-toasted, mostly-and woke up again, and here I were.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honorable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness-these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without which money can buy nothing.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The bourgeoisie's weapon is starvation. If as a writer or artist you run counter to their narrow notions they simplyand silently withdraw your means of subsistence. I sometimes wonder how many people of talent are executed in this way every year.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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
Even the mechanical engineer comes at last to an end of his figures, and must stand up, a practical man, face to face with the discrepancies of nature and the hiatuses of theory.

Robert Louis Stevenson
My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It's time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at tea-time and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I have never seen the sea quiet round Treasure Island. The sun might blaze overhead, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still these great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night; and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men.

Robert Louis Stevenson
O wind, a-blowing all day long, O wind, that sings so loud a song!

Robert Louis Stevenson
Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very strange - a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.

Robert Louis Stevenson