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Robert Louis Stevenson
156 quotes
“To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Inland Voyage (1878), Ch. III, "The Royal Sport Nautique".
“Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Inland Voyage (1878).
“Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: An Inland Voyage (1878).
“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 (1850–1894) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'La Fère of Cursed Memory', 15th vignette of An Inland Voyage (1878), in Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson, Stevenson, e-artnow (2015)
“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 (1850–1894) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878).
“For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1878 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1878).
“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1882 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
“Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1882 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Gossip on Romance, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).
“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1882 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882).
“In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1884 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Old Mortality (1884).
“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1887 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Memories and Portraits, ch. IV. A College Magazine (1887).
“Youth is wholly experimental.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to a Young Gentleman Scribner's Magazine (September 1888).
“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1889 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Wrong Box, ch. 7 (1889).
“Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Lay Morals" Ch. 4, in Lay Morals and Other Essays (1911).
“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 (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pleasant Land of Counterpane.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Land of Counterpane, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Youth now flees on feathered foot.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To Will H. Low, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Prince Otto, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“There is but one art, to omit.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As cited in The Harper Book of Quotations, Revised Edition (1993), Ed. R. Fitzhenry, HarperCollins, p. 498 : , 9780062732132
“It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in the retrospect. We should have been cut-throats to do otherwise. And there's an end. We ought to know distinctly that we are damned for what we do wrong; but when we have done right, we have only been gentlemen, after all. There is nothing to make a work about.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reflections and Remarks on Human Life", VI: Right and Wrong, published in Works: Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson -- Sketches, Criticisms, Etc. (1895), p. 628.
“He and his tyrannicide! I am in a mad fury about these explosions. If that is the new world! Damn O'Donovan Rossa; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him!”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1881 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Sidney Colvin, 2 August 1881. Quoted in Terrorism and Literature Chapter 12 - “Parliament Is Burning” by Deaglán Ó Donghaile
“A good conscience is eight parts of courage.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1893 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Catriona, ch. XI (1893).
“Already an old man, he [Samuel Johnson] ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. It is better to live and be done with it, than to die daily in the sick-room.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By all means begin your folio; even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) first seen 1876 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cornhill Magazine, (August 1876)
“Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances. To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honourable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artist in life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbour.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is as natural and as right for a young man to be imprudent and exaggerated, to live in swoops and circles, and beat about his cage like any other wild thing newly captured, as it is for old men to turn gray, or mothers to love their offspring, or heroes to die for something worthier than their lives.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose it is written that any one who sets up for a bit of a philosopher, must contradict himself to his very face. For here have I fairly talked myself into thinking that we have the whole thing before us at last; that there is no answer to the mystery, except that there are as many as you please; that there is no centre to the maze because, like the famous sphere, its centre is everywhere; and that agreeing to differ with every ceremony of politeness, is the only “one undisturbed song of pure concent” to which we are ever likely to lend our musical voices.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. ... They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. We need not care whether they could prove the forty-seventh proposition; they do a better thing than that, they practically demonstrate the great Theorem of the Liveableness of Life.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) said by 1894 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source