Robert Louis Stevenson - Life Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

View all Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Life, at any moment and in any view, is as dangerous as a sinking ship; and yet it is man's handsome fashion to carry umbrellas, to wear india-rubber overshoes, to begin vast works, and to conduct himself in every way as if he might hope to be eternal.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetities, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.

Robert Louis Stevenson
What livelihood can repay a human creature for a life spent in this huge sameness? … A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope for.
Of Nebraska

Robert Louis Stevenson
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters... I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Give to me the life I love,
Let the lave go by me,
Give the jolly heaven above
And the byway nigh me.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert.

Robert Louis Stevenson
All who have meant good work with their whole hearts, have done good work, although they may die before they have the time to sign it. Every heart that has beat strong and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. And even if death catch people, like an open pitfall, and in mid-career, laying out vast projects, and planning monstrous foundations, flushed with hope, and their mouths full of boastful language, they should be at once tripped up and silenced: is there not something brave and spirited in such a termination? and does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice, than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas?

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life.

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

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
In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

Robert Louis Stevenson
As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this — that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

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
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
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
I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.

Robert Louis Stevenson
We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.

Robert Louis Stevenson