Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The untented Kosmos my abode,
I pass, a wilful stranger:
My mistress still the open road
And the bright eyes of danger.

Robert Louis Stevenson
A child should always say what's true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table;
At least as far as he is able.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.

Robert Louis Stevenson
And what would it be to grow old? For, after a certain distance, every step we take in life we find the ice growing thinner below our feet, and all around us and behind us we see our contemporaries going through.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

Robert Louis Stevenson
This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To be honest, to be kind — to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation — above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself — here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
But all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold,
Was that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

Robert Louis Stevenson
If a man love the labor of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt.

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
I who all the Winter through,
Cherished other loves than you
And kept hands with hoary policy in marriage-bed and pew;
Now I know the false and true,
For the earnest sun looks through,
And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.

Robert Louis Stevenson
We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

Robert Louis Stevenson
His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.

Robert Louis Stevenson
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

Robert Louis Stevenson
We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

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
I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man's shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference.

Robert Louis Stevenson
All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The rain is falling all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea. - Rain

Robert Louis Stevenson