Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes & Sayings

Ye are a great piper. I'm not fit to blow in the same kingdom with ye. Body of me! ye have mair music in your sporran than I have in my head; And though it still stick in my mind that I could maybe show you another of it with the cold steel, I warn you beforehand-it'll no be fair! It would go against my heart to haggle a man that can blow the pipes as you can! — Robert Louis Stevenson

It was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard. "This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?" My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity. "Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," he cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum — Robert Louis Stevenson

For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all impudences of the brawling world reach you no more. — Robert Louis Stevenson

High up overhead the snow settled among the tracery
of the cathedral towers. Many a niche was drifted full; many a statue
wore a long white bonnet on its grotesque or sainted head. The gargoyles
had been transformed into great false noses, drooping toward the point.
The crockets were like upright pillows swollen on one side. In the
intervals of the wind there was a dull sound dripping about the
precincts of the church. — 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

The Cigarette had a mackintosh which put him more or less above these contrarieties. But I had to bear the brunt uncovered. I began to remember that nature was a woman. My companion, in a rosier temper, listened with great satisfaction to my Jeremiads, and ironically concurred. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I believe you to be strictly honorable.'He thoughtfully emptied his cup. 'I wish I could add you were intelligent,' he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles. — Robert Louis Stevenson

There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well. — Robert Louis Stevenson

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. — Robert Louis Stevenson

This Mr Thomson seems a gentleman of some choice qualities, though perhaps a trifle bloody-minded. It would please me none the worse, if (with all his merits) he were soused in the North Sea; for the man, Mr Balfour, is a sore embarrassment. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be heard of. ~Jekyll — 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

All by myself I have to go, With none to tell me what to do - All alone beside the streams And up the mountain-sides of dreams. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. — Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide. — Robert Louis Stevenson

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 — Robert Louis Stevenson

Loving God, help us remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men. — Robert Louis Stevenson

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation. — Robert Louis Stevenson

It is always a bad sign when the lower classes laugh: their taste in humour is both poor and sinister; — 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

It is not enough to be ready to go where duty calls. A man should stand around where he can hear the call! — Robert Louis Stevenson

You can kill the body but not the spirit. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town's life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Doctors is all swabs. — Robert Louis Stevenson

With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night
That somehow the right is the right
And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:
Lord, if that were enough? — Robert Louis Stevenson

Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Overhead, the wild huntsman of the storm passed continuously in one blare of mingled noises; screaming wind, straining timber, lashing rope's end, pounding block and bursting sea contributed; and I could have thought there was at times another, a more piercing, a more human note, that dominated all, like the wailing of an angel; I could have thought I knew the angel's name, and that his wings were black. — 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

yo ho ho and a bottle of rum — Robert Louis Stevenson

-I am not sure whether he's sane.
-If there's any doubt about the matter, he is. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral. — Robert Louis Stevenson

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others. — 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

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

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour. — Robert Louis Stevenson

What a number of things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its heart! — Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
Hated, as their age increases,
By their nephews and their nieces. — 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

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. — Robert Louis Stevenson

He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn't specify the point. He's an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No sir; I can make no hand of it; I can't describe him. And it's not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Make up your mind to be happy. — Robert Louis Stevenson

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong. — Robert Louis Stevenson

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves. — Robert Louis Stevenson

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener; — Robert Louis Stevenson

A trifle more of that man,'he would say,'and I shall explode. — Robert Louis Stevenson

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. — Robert Louis Stevenson

It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. — Robert Louis Stevenson

A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.
-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE — Robert Louis Stevenson

He recollected his courage. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body. — Robert Louis Stevenson

For some thoughts, which sure would be the most beautiful, vanish before we can rightly scan their features; as though a god, travelling by our green highways, should but ope the door, give one smiling look into the house, and go again for ever. — 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

Block City
What are you able to build with your blocks?
Castles and palaces, temples and docks.
Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,
But I can be happy and building at home.
Let the sofa be mountains, the carpet be sea,
There I'll establish a city for me:
A kirk and a mill and a palace beside,
And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride.
Great is the palace with pillar and wall,
A sort of a tower on top of it all,
And steps coming down in an orderly way
To where my toy vessels lie safe in the bay.
This one is sailing and that one is moored:
Hark to the song of the sailors on board!
And see on the steps of my palace, the kings
Coming and going with presents and things! — 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

Nobody speaks of a beautifful view for 5 minutes — Robert Louis Stevenson

I who all the Winter through,
Cherished other loves than you
And kept hands with hoary policy in marriage-bed and pew;
Now I know the false and true,
For the earnest sun looks through,
And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew. — Robert Louis Stevenson

It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I wish these flies would piss off. — Robert Louis Stevenson

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

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Them that die'll be the lucky ones. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror. — 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

Children are certainly too good to be true. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Alan," cried I, "what makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow?"
Deed, and I don't, know" said Alan. "For just precisely what I thought I liked about ye, was that ye never quarrelled: - and now I like ye better! — Robert Louis Stevenson

Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views - amen, so be it. And — Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside.
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown-
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down! — Robert Louis Stevenson

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Sit loosely in the saddle. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Captain," said I, — Robert Louis Stevenson

This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?" My father told him no, very little company, the more was the pity. — Robert Louis Stevenson

I smoke a pipe abroad, because
To all cigars I much prefer it,
And as I scorn you social laws,
My choice has nothing to deter it. — Robert Louis Stevenson

The rain is falling all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea. - Rain — Robert Louis Stevenson

You may lay to that. — Robert Louis Stevenson

What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps a-field. — Robert Louis Stevenson

When I was a boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew weather it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now I know that it is myself, and stick to that. — 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 on these bonds. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind. — 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's never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a'terward - Long John Silver — Robert Louis Stevenson

This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still. — Robert Louis Stevenson

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a man who does not smoke. — Robert Louis Stevenson

He should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it were as respectableasthe Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Ethics are my veiled mistress; I love them, but know not what they are. — Robert Louis Stevenson

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. — Robert Louis Stevenson

His interest never flagged. He would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with magical celerity. — Robert Louis Stevenson

You're either my ship's cook-and then you were treated handsome-or Cap'n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang! — Robert Louis Stevenson