Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man--or scarce a man yet--the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. 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. 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

Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard.

~ 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.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

It is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a flying enemy

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.

~ 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

Doctors is all swabs.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Everyone lives by selling something.

~ 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 to take rank not as a prophet but as an unteachable brat well birched and none the wiser.

~ 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

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

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

The cruellest lies are often told in silence.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

If your morals make you dreary depend on it they are wrong.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Saints are sinners who kept on going.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I have resolved that from this day on I will do all the business I can honestly have all the fun I can reasonably do all the good I can willingly and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Anyone can carry his burden however hard until nightfall. Anyone can do his work however hard for one day. Anyone can live sweetly patiently lovingly purely till the sun goes down. And this is all life really means.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you that you ought to prefer is to have kept your soul alive.

~ 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

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

For my part I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone but principally by catch words.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

There is but one art to omit.

~ 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

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

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson