Stevenson Quotes

Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson

I didn't want to be the typical teen idol. I didn't want to be Leif Garrett. I didn't want to be Shaun Cassidy, David Cassidy or Parker Stevenson. I wanted to do my own thing. ~ Willie Aames

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. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Sitting there with Val's warm little body against my side and his silky-soft hair against my cheek, I felt happy and peaceful. Before this I had loved Val because he was Ronnie's son, but now I loved him for himself... and I knew there would be no more trouble. He would feel miserable at times--that could not be helped--but he would let me comfort him. And I saw how foolish I had been to fuss and worry about "the right approach" because of course "the right approach" to all our fellow creatures is just to love them. ~ D.E. Stevenson

The Flowers
All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,
Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.
Fairy places, fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames
These must all be fairy names!
Tiny woods below whose boughs
Shady fairies weave a house;
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb!
Fair are grown-up people's trees,
But the fairest woods are these;
Where, if I were not so tall,
I should live for good and all ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight,
The great artificer made my mate. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

It was high time, for I now began to be tortured with thirst. The glow of the sun from above, its thousandfold reflection from the waves, the sea-water that fell and dried upon me, caking my very lips with salt, combined to make my throat burn and my brain ache. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

[N]o lie can live forever... ~ Bryan Stevenson

Rosa Parks turned to me sweetly and asked, 'Now, Bryan, tell me who you are and what you're doing.' I looked at Ms. Carr to see if I had permission to speak, and she smiled and nodded at me. I then gave Ms. Parks my rap. 'Yes, ma'am. Well, I have a law project called the Equal Justice Initiative, and we're trying to help people on death row. We're trying to stop the death penalty, actually. We're trying to do something about prison conditions and excessive punishment. We want to free people who've been wrongly convicted. We want to end unfair sentences in criminal cases and stop racial bias in criminal justice...Ms. Parks leaned back smiling. 'Ooooh, honey, all that's going to make you tired, tired, tired.' We all laughed. I looked down, a little embarrassed. Then Ms. Carr leaned forward and put her finger in my face and talked o me just like my grandmother used to talk to me. She said, 'That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave.' All three women nodded in silent agreement and for just a little while, they made me feel like a young prince. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Nobody more welcome than yourself, ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Black mail I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the place with the door, in consequence. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Saskatchewan is much like Texas - except it's more friendly to the United States. ~ Adlai Stevenson

Sometimes I think it'd be fun to do a completely different job for a while. You've got one life and you do the same job for the whole of it, and you think - was that a good use of a life? ~ Juliet Stevenson

So many of us have become afraid and angry. We've become so fearful and vengeful that we've thrown away children, discarded the disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak - not because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I ~ Bryan Stevenson

Really don't choose every day from the harvest you experience but from the seeds you plant ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

subjective disturbance ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

American prisons have become warehouses for the mentally ill. Mass incarceration has been largely ruled by misguided drug policy and excessive sentencing, but the internment of hundreds of thousands of poor and mentally ill people has been a driving force in achieving our record levels of imprisonment. ~ Bryan Stevenson

You've got criminal courts and child welfare officials refusing to do their jobs and protect children so they can shift the cases over to family court where predatory professionals can turn a dirty buck off the atrocities committed against children. ~ Anne Stevenson

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

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson

The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on it's vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to it's security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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

It really reminds me of the great movies of the 30's and 40's with huge sets and voluminous fireplaces you could walk around in. Glazed floors. I was expecting a Busby Berkley dance number. Big fanfare and all the girls coming out. I'd have joined in. It's got that scale, you know? ~ Ray Stevenson

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer's eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare (The Carew Murder Case) ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Of course... I still wonder about every stranger who gives me a knowing look. About every cat who watched me too closely. I can only hope I reached her in some small way. I can only hope that if she does come back, she'll know me for who I am. A friend. ~ Noelle Stevenson

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I often don't feel like the person I look like. ~ Juliet Stevenson

A birdie with a yellow bill Hoped upon the window sill, Cocked his shining eye and said: 'Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-'ead? ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I like people who are enthused about things they do, like travel, sports, work. I like being with people who have things they're excited about. ~ Parker Stevenson

Florida is one of a few states that allows the prosecutor to decide to charge a child in adult court for certain crimes and has no minimum age for trying a child as an adult. ~ Bryan Stevenson

We live in an era of revolution, the revolution of rising expectations. ~ Adlai Stevenson

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

The San Francisco Stock Exchange was the place that continuously pumped up the savings of the lower classes into the pockets of the millionaires. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson II

I have quite a robust relationship with regret. You simply don't know what the alternative would have been. ~ Juliet Stevenson

In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

History is written by victors and, occasionally, sensationalist journalists. I mean that with the best respect. ~ Ray Stevenson

If talent is a natural aptitude for creation with an outlook on life peculiar to oneself, then genius is to have an outlook on life, peculiar to oneself, which yet appeals to everybody. Talent is for oneself and a few others, but genius is universal. ~ D.E. Stevenson

It is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a flying enemy ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

How can you grow with your present to get ready for your future if you continue to live in your past and all that it contains. ~ Angelica Stevenson

Embracing a certain quotient of racial bias and discrimination against the poor is an inexorable aspect of supporting capital punishment. This is an immoral condition that makes rejecting the death penalty on moral grounds not only defensible but necessary for those who refuse to accept unequal or unjust administration of punishment. ~ Bryan Stevenson

The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

No, I'm happy doing this. Five sweaters and a pair of dirty pants, you can make pretty good money. ~ McLean Stevenson

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions. ~ Anne Stevenson

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. ~ Bryan Stevenson

We fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of fear and pain. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Cartoons, often, that you do for the New Yorker don't appear for months afterwards, and the record for that is a cartoon that was bought by James Stevenson in 1987 and didn't appear until 2000. ~ Robert Mankoff

My parents, who grew up in terror and dealt with segregation and humiliation, nonetheless taught us to be hopeful and open and loving and not hateful toward anyone. ~ Bryan Stevenson

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. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

If I am judging then I am not loving. How can I love if I judge? I won't be able to love if all I do is judge. So that means LESS judging and MORE loving. ~ Angelica Stevenson

Cruelty to children is the thing I can least bear in the world. ~ Juliet Stevenson

Money alone is only a mean; it presupposes a man to use it. The rich man can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere. He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither patience to read nor intelligence to see ... The purse may be full and the heart empty. He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him ... he may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

After the moon went down, the heaven was a thing to wonder at for stars. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Montgomery's unique role in the domestic slave trade was that it was the first community that had a rail line that connected the Deep South to the mid-Atlantic region. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson II

Caroline was slightly taken aback (shocked would be much too strong a word to describe her feelings). It was difficult to know what to say to Widgeon. The whole affair seemed so topsy turvy, so typical of the topsy turvy conditions of modern life. She had tried to help her country by Growing More Food, and all she had got for the trouble involved was more trouble. She had received countless forms to fill up; she had been visited by inspectors who seemed to think it was within their province to be rude to her, and who treated her as if she were trying to defraud the authorities of their just and lawful due, and she had been fined quite heavily for doing something she did not know was wrong. Somewhat naturally Caroline felt annoyed and the opportunity to break the law without any risk at all tempted her considerably. ~ D.E. Stevenson

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

There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson

Lady Esmeralda's background was no less interesting than herself; it was a colourful picture of luxury and squalor. Armies of servants thronged the great houses; coaches rumbled up to the doors. Huge meals were eaten at tables laden with silver and lit by candles; there was drinking and gambling and duelling. Highwaymen frequented lonely roads and footpads lurked in the streets. Thieves were hanged and crowds gathered to see the grisly entertainment. The picture of life in those far-off days became so real and clear that I felt as if I had lived in them myself. It was almost as if I remembered them. Sometimes I returned to them in my dreams (which was not always enjoyable) and occasionally I found myself ~ D.E. 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

There are very few people in the world with courage enough to admit that they do not care for music (dogs and children come into the same category) and so brand themselves forever as Philistines in the eyes of their friends. ~ D.E. Stevenson

I didn't deserve reconciliation or love in that moment, but that's how mercy works. The ~ Bryan Stevenson

Books are people,' smiled Miss Marks. 'In every book worth reading, the author is there to meet you, to establish contact with you. He takes you into his confidence and reveals his thoughts to you. ~ D.E. Stevenson

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. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Because if you walk in a city you're jostled by hundreds of indifferent people with indifferent eyes that look at you as if you weren't there at all. You begin to feel you must be invisible. Hundreds and thousands of eyes, and not one pair really seeing you or caring who you are. I'd rather walk down Beilford High Street and know that everybody was saying, 'There goes the mad painter!' It's better to be mad than invisible." She ~ D.E. Stevenson

But simply punishing the broken
walking away from them or hiding them from sight
only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Flower god, god of the spring, beautiful, bountiful,
Cold-dyed shield in the sky, lover of versicles,
Here I wander in April
Cold, grey-headed; and still to my
Heart, Spring comes with a bound, Spring the deliverer,
Spring, song-leader in woods, chorally resonant;
Spring, flower-planter in meadows,
Child-conductor in willowy
Fields deep dotted with bloom, daisies and crocuses:
Here that child from his heart drinks of eternity:
O child, happy are children! ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The obscurest epoch is today. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

But a word once spoken who can recapture it? ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

My earlier poems were sadder than my poems are today, perhaps because I wrote them in confusion or when I was unhappy. But I am not a melancholy person, quite the contrary, no one enjoys laughing more than I do. ~ Anne Stevenson

The journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. So we must never neglect any work of peace within our reach, however small. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson

One more step, Mr. Hands," said I, "and I'll blow your brains out! Dead men don't bite, you know," I added with a chuckle. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very strange--a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking. ~Jekyll ~ 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

Here it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it's hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art. ~ Anne Stevenson

There were several books on a shelf; one lay beside the tea things open, and Utterson was amazed to find it a copy of a pious work, for which Jekyll had several times expressed a great esteem, annotated, in his own hand with startling blasphemies. Next, ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Somebody has to stand when other people are sitting. Somebody has to speak when other people are quiet. ~ Bryan Stevenson

The landscape in Montgomery and in the South is just saturated with imagery. Markers are everywhere. There's a marker for the first Confederate post office, there's a marker for a ball that Robert E. Lee hosted, there's a marker for where Jefferson Davis had a meeting. We love reminding people about all that was going on in the mid-nineteenth century. ~ Bryan Stevenson

I might be dead, but that hasn't stopped me so far and it's not about to start now. ~ Sharon 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

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

I truly haven't. You've messed up my mojo. ~ Beckie Stevenson

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice. ~ Adlai E. Stevenson

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson