Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
We were at sea—there is no other adequate expression—on the plains of Nebraska.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.

Robert Louis Stevenson
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

Robert Louis Stevenson
We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse.

Robert Louis Stevenson
They were a rough lot indeed, as sailors mostly are; being men rooted out of all the kindly parts of life, and condemned to toss together on the rough seas, with masters no less cruel.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!

Robert Louis Stevenson
What hangs people…is the unfortunate circumstance of guilt.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

Robert Louis Stevenson
Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Let first the onion flourish there,
Rose among roots, the maiden-fair,
Wine-scented and poetic soul
Of the capacious salad bowl.

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
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
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
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