Robert Louis Stevenson - Man Quotes

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A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I have never seen the sea quiet round Treasure Island. The sun might blaze overhead, the air be without a breath, the surface smooth and blue, but still these great rollers would be running along all the external coast, thundering and thundering by day and night; and I scarce believe there is one spot in the island where a man would be out of earshot of their noise.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Bright is the ring of words
When the right man rings them.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Of all my verse, like not a single line;
But like my title, for it is not mine.
That title from a better man I stole:
Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!

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
Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.

Robert Louis Stevenson
The observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven for which he lives. And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Already an old man, he [Samuel Johnson] ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea.

Robert Louis Stevenson
A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.

Robert Louis Stevenson
I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson
I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

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
My idea of man's chief end was to enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so.

Robert Louis Stevenson
These are my politics: to change what we can; to better what we can; but still to bear in mind that man is but a devil weakly fettered by some generous beliefs and impositions; and for no word however sounding, and no cause however just and pious, to relax the stricture of these bonds.

Robert Louis Stevenson
We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.

Robert Louis Stevenson
Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.
Late in the night when the fires are out,
Why does he gallop and gallop about?

Robert Louis Stevenson
Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives.

Robert Louis Stevenson
There's never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a'terward" - Long John Silver

Robert Louis Stevenson
This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.

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
It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

Robert Louis Stevenson
When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

Robert Louis Stevenson
O God! I screamed, and "O God! Again and again; for there before my eyes - pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death - there stood Henry Jekyll."

Robert Louis Stevenson
Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

Robert Louis Stevenson
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! As for the others, the irony of facts shall take it out of their hands, and make fools of them in downright earnest, ere the farce be over.

Robert Louis Stevenson
It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.

Robert Louis Stevenson