Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

As in all other places of resort, one type predominated: people in the prime of youth, with every show of intelligence and sensibility in their appearance, but with little promise of strength or the quality that makes success.

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.

There is no music like a little river's ... It takes the mind out-of-doors ... and ... it quiets a man down like saying his prayers.

He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.

AWAY with funeral music - set
The pipe to powerful lips -
The cup of life's for him that drinks
And not for him that sips.

Trelawney," said the doctor, "contrary to all my notions, I believe you have managed to get two honest men on board with you
that man and John Silver."
Silver, if you like," cried the squire, "but as for that intolcrable humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and downright un-English.

The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole.

No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others.

The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.

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.

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

There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine.

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.

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.

If it comes to a swinging, swing all, say I.

You may lay to that.

A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest blessings.

The friendly cow, all red and white, I love with all my heart; She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart.

By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described.

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

Her eyes took hold upon mine and clung there, and bound us together like the joining of hands; and the moments we thus stood face to face, drinking each other in, were sacramental and the wedding of souls.

We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable
not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.

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.

Years may go by, and the wheel in the river Wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day, Wheel and keep roaring and foaming for ever Long after all of the boys are away. Home for the Indies and home from the ocean, Heroes and soldiers we all will come home; Still we shall find the old mill wheel in motion, Turning and churning that river to foam. You with the bean that I gave when we quarrelled, I with your marble of Saturday last, Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled, Here we shall meet and remember the past.

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

We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

It offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest.

The world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

I incline to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

about as emotional as a bagpipe.

Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.

And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.

Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.

And still the figure had no face by which he might know it; even in his dreams, it had no face ...

The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;
She shines on thieves on the garden wall,
On streets and fields and harbour quays,
And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees.

I was still cursed with my duality of purpose.

The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.

Although I express myself with some degree of pleasantry, the purport of my words is entirely serious.

So I must have lain for hours, continually beaten to and fro upon the billows, now and again wetted with flying sprays, and never ceasing to expect death at the next plunge.

Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.

Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
And like the mandrake comes with groans.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

Both sides of me were in dead earnest.

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.

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.

If you would grow great and stately,
You must try to walk sedately.

Take care of each other.

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.

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

... Bear up until you see you're gaining.

Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.

It was a master surgeon, him that ampytated me - out of college and all - Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle.

By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.

Come, come, Cap'n, be just," returned the other. "There's no call to be angry with me in earnest. I'm on'y a chara'ter in a sea story. I don't really exist.

If ever a seaman wanted drugs, it's me," he

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham - the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself.

Everything is true; only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned.

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

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.

To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.

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

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

man is not truly one, but two

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

Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as achievement?

Come back? There is no coming back, young ladies, on the impetuous stream of life.

Ah, said Silver, it were fortunate for me that I had Hawkins here. You would have let old john be cut to bits, and never given it a thought, doctor.
'Not a thought,' replied Dr. Livesey cheerily.

Idleness does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formualries of the ruling class.

My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.

The moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde

Thems that die'll be the lucky ones.

The man's tongue is fit to frighten the French. Another fever."
Ah, there," said Morgan, "that comed of sp'iling Bibles."
That comed
as you call it
of being arrant asses.

Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.

I wish these flies would piss off.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

The best things in life are nearest, breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet.

That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his reading-desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, however, as soon as the cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his business-room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll's Will, and sat down with a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph, for Mr. Utterson, though he took charge of it now that

I hate to write, but I love to have written.

I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

To flee was more than I could find courage for; but I registered a vow of unsleeping circumspection.

The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.

Be what you are, and become what you are capable of becoming.

I had four blak arrows under my belt,
Four for the greefs that I have felt,
Four for the number of ill menne
That have oppressid me now and then.
One is gone; one is wele sped;
Old Apulyaird is dead.
One is for Maister Bennet Hatch,
That burned Grimstone, walls and thatch.
One for Sir Oliver Oates,
That cut Sir Harry Shelton's throat.
Sir Daniel, ye shull have the fourt;
We shall think it fair sport.
Ye shull each have your own part,
A blak arrow in each blak heart.
Get ye to your knees for to pray;
Ye are ded theeves, by yea and nay!
JON AMEND-ALL
Of the Green Wood,
And his jolly fellaweship

We pass our lives entirely in the search for extravagant adventures; and there is no extravagance with which we are not capable of sympathy

This is a handy cove, and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?

All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

Love- what is love?
A great and aching heart;
Wrung hands;
and silence;
and a long despair