Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

321 Sourced Quotes

The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Like schoolboys we play among the shadows cast by the turrets of the temple of oblivion, towards which we travel, regardless of what awaits us in the vale of years beneath. Suffering and disease are ever before us, but life is very pleasant; and the motto of the world, when well, is "forward with the dance."

Robert Louis Stevenson
If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

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
It blows a snowing gale in the winter of the year;
The boats are on the sea and the crews are on the pier.
The needle of the vane, it is veering to and fro,
A flash of sun is on the veering of the vane.
Autumn leaves and rain,
The passion of the gale.

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
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
But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life.

Robert Louis Stevenson
If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves.

Robert Louis Stevenson
One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal Green - one more, and my bosom Feels new life with an ecstasy.

Robert Louis Stevenson
They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;

Robert Louis Stevenson
If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife

Robert Louis Stevenson
The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.

Robert Louis Stevenson