Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Doctors is all swabs... and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the doctor know of lands like that? — and I lived on rum, I tell you.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Courage, the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand.

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
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning; they find private messages, assurances of love, and expressions of gratitude, dropped at every corner. The public is but a generous patron who defrays the postage.

Robert Louis Stevenson
These are my politics: to change what we can; to better what we can; but still to bear in mind that man is but a devil weakly fettered by some generous beliefs and impositions; and for no word however sounding, and no cause however just and pious, to relax the stricture of these bonds.

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
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Fifteen men on the dead man's chest —
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
Drink and the devil had done for the rest —
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

Robert Louis Stevenson
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

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 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
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
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
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.

Robert Louis Stevenson
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.

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

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

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
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
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