Robert Louis Stevenson quotes Showing 1-30 of 960
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“The cruelest lies are often told in silence.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm. ”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“If he be Mr. Hyde” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“A friend is a gift you give yourself.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.”
― 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 is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it. ”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.”
― 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
“Sir, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“You must suffer me to go my own dark way.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Wine is bottled poetry.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”
― 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
“There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Everyone, at some time or another, sits down to a banquet of consequences. ”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“You cannot run away from a weakness, you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now and where you stand?”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Fifteen men on the Dead Man’s Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“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.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“The world is so full of a number of things, I ’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others…”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“REQUIEM
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.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“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.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Many’s the long night I’ve dreamed of cheese–toasted mostly.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety, and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavours. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temparate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune, and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
“Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It’s the glory of the sea that has turned my head.”
― 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
“Books are good enough in their own way but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson