Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

When we look in to the long avenue of the future, and see the good there is for each one of us to do, we realize, after all, what a beautiful thing it is to work, and to live, and to be happy.

The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.

When Christ came into my life, I came about like a well-handled ship.

Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.

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

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.

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

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

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

No man is useless while he has a friend.

I know what happiness is, for I have done good work.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

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.

Anyone can carry their burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do their work, however hard, for one day.

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

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.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

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.

If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.

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.

Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.

We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

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.

Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest

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

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

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

Courage, the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.

You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

I wish these flies would piss off.

I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.

The physician...is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization.

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

Sir, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.

So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.

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.

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.

If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

Sightseeing is the art of disappointment.

There is nothing but God's grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe.

The bold may not live long, but the timid never live at all.