Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

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.

There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.

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

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

It is one of the worst things of sentiment that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that what is spoken.

The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

Going for character: why not now, and where you stand?

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.

He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches.

A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind.

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.

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

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

We can only know others by ourselves.

If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.

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.

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.

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

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

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Life is not a matter of holding good cards

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

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.

There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.

Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

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.

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.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

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

A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy.

Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.

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.

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.

The seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they awaken in the mind of man . . . If we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct upon our pages.

But of works of art little can be said.

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.

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.

A man met a lad weeping. "What do you weep for?" he asked. "I am weeping for my sins," said the lad. "You must have little to do," said the man. The next day, they met again. Once more the lad was weeping. "Why do you weep now?" asked the man. "I am weeping because I have nothing to eat," said the lad. "I thought it would come to that," said the man.

Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted mostly.

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

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

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

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.

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.