Robert Louis Stevenson

Fifteen men on the dead man's chest — Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Doctors is all swabs...and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the doctor know of lands like that? — and I lived on rum, I tell you.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

What is the Black Spot, Captain?" "That's a summons, mate.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Many's a long night I've dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Them that die will be the lucky ones!

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

In winter I get up at nightI have to go to bed by day.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

A child should always say what's trueAt least as far as he is able.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Whenever the moon and stars are set,Why does he gallop and gallop about?

— Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The friendly cow all red and white,To eat with apple-tart.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is so full of a number of things,I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.

— 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

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.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Children, you are very little,And your bones are very brittle.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Of all my verse, like not a single line;Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Let first the onion flourish there,Of the capacious salad bowl.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Dear Andrew, with the brindled hairBy Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Under the wide and starry sky,And the hunter home from the hill.

— 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

Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain

— Robert Louis Stevenson

My body which my dungeon is,All the day long to and fro.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

There's just ae thing I cannae bear,An' that's my conscience.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,And the road below me.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The untented Kosmos my abode,And the bright eyes of danger.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

I will make you brooches and toys for your delightOf bird-song at morning and star-shine at night.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Bright is the ring of wordsWhen the right man rings them.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

In the highlands, in the country places,Quiet eyes.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

God, if this were enough,That I see things bare to the buff.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,Made my mate.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,Hills of home!

— Robert Louis Stevenson

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: — surely that may be his epitaph of which he need not be ashamed.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

REQUIEM

— Robert Louis Stevenson

There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To forget oneself is to be happy.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

The world is so full of a number of things, I ’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great gar, others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

REQUIEM

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;

— Robert Louis Stevenson

There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Wine is bottled poetry.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Am I no a bonny fighter?

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Youth is wholly experimental.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is — nor yet so good a Christian.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Ice and iron cannot be welded.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

There is but one art, to omit.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

Wine is bottled poetry.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

— Robert Louis Stevenson