Robert Louis Stevenson - Life Quotes

51 Sourced Quotes

View all Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

Robert Louis Stevenson
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

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
The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.

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
Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Dr. Jekyll to an end.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

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
The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national 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
To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

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
The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

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

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

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
Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life.

Robert Louis Stevenson
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

Robert Louis Stevenson