Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

Robert Louis Stevenson
My lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it were as respectableasthe Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
Hated, as their age increases,
By their nephews and their nieces.

Robert Louis Stevenson
For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all impudences of the brawling world reach you no more.

Robert Louis Stevenson
In the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens
Quiet eyes.

Robert Louis Stevenson
She is settling fast? said the First Lieutenant as he returned from shaving. "Fast, Mr. Spoker?" asked the Captain. "The expression is a strange one, for Time (if you will think of it) is only relative."

Robert Louis Stevenson
When I was a boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew weather it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now I know that it is myself, and stick to that.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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
A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.

Robert Louis Stevenson
"And what is the sea?" asked Will. "The sea!" cried the miller. "Lord help us all, it is the greatest thing God made!.There are great fish in it five times bigger than a bull, and one old serpent as long as our river and as old as all the world, with whiskers like a man, and a crown of silver on her head.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to another.

Robert Louis Stevenson
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
For will anyone dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never seen an office, who says so.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The sticks break, the stones crumble, The eternal altars tilt and tumble, Sanctions and tales dislimn like mist About the amazed evangelist. He stands unshook from age to youth Upon one pin-point of the truth.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse.

Robert Louis Stevenson
This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

Robert Louis Stevenson
The duty of the engineer is twofold — to design the work, and to see the work done.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.

Robert Louis Stevenson
And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle

Robert Louis Stevenson
To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life's raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very foremost badge of modern civilization--the Urim and Thummim of respectability.... So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is... to live forever.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.

Robert Louis Stevenson
If you would grow great and stately,
You must try to walk sedately.

Robert Louis Stevenson