Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

We should strive to go on in fortune and misfortune like a clock during a thunderstorm.

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.

Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity.

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.

A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.

Take care of each other.

The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.

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.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

The smack of California earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.

To be honest...here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude...

To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artis en life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor.

The FlowersAll the names I know from nurse:Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,And the Lady Hollyhock.Fairy places, fairy things,Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,Tiny trees for tiny dames-These must all be fairy names!Tiny woods below whose boughsShady fairies weave a house;Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,Where the braver fairies climb!Fair are grown-up people's trees,But the fairest woods are these;Where, if I were not so tall,I should live for good and all

To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not how we end, of what we want and not what we have.

It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

If they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed.

The world has no room for cowards.

There's never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a'terward.

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.

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.

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.

Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life.

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!

Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.

I believe in an ultimate decency of things.

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.

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.

Jealousy is the most radical primeval and naked form of admiration in war paint, so to speak.

The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

The spirit, Sir, is one of mockery.

When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.

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