Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes - Page 2

Everyone lives by selling something.
Robert Louis Stevenson
By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
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
There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine.
Robert Louis Stevenson
You must suffer me to go my own dark way.
Robert Louis Stevenson
This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Doctors is all swabs.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.
Robert Louis Stevenson
No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.
Robert Louis Stevenson
It is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a flying enemy
Robert Louis Stevenson
The rain is falling all around,It falls on field and tree,It rains on the umbrellas here,And on the ships at sea.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.
Robert Louis Stevenson
My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.
Robert Louis Stevenson
You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man--or scarce a man yet--the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late.
Robert Louis Stevenson
And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Captain," said the squire, "the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?""Strike my colours!" cried the captain, "No sir, not I"...
Robert Louis Stevenson
They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;
Robert Louis Stevenson
I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I believe you to be strictly honorable.'He thoughtfully emptied his cup. 'I wish I could add you were intelligent,' he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There is a romance about all those who are abroad in the black hours.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Old is the tree and the fruit good,Very old and thick the wood.Woodman, is your courage stout?Beware! the root is wrapped aboutYour mother's heart, your father's bones;And like the mandrake comes with groans.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
Robert Louis Stevenson
You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest
Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.
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
Don't you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?
Robert Louis Stevenson
...with a strong strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.
Robert Louis Stevenson
He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier.
Robert Louis Stevenson
he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.
Robert Louis Stevenson
It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times,And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.
Robert Louis Stevenson
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny after ward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine.
Robert Louis Stevenson
... I deny your right to put words into my mouth.
Robert Louis Stevenson
We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. It's trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But there's no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, that's my view.
Robert Louis Stevenson
With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.
Robert Louis Stevenson
All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson
At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
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
The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;She shines on thieves on the garden wall,On streets and fields and harbour quays,And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.
Robert Louis Stevenson
This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
Robert Louis Stevenson
...That insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The HISPANIOLA still lay where she had anchored; but, sure enough, there was the Jolly Roger--the black flag of piracy--flying from her peak.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ship's doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenter's mate; John Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce, owner's servants, landsmen--being all that is left faithful of the ship's company--with stores for ten days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew British colours on the log-house in Treasure Island. Thomas Redruth, owner's servant, landsman, shot by the mutineers; James Hawkins, cabin boy--'And at the same time, I was wondering over poor Jim Hawkins' fate.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Ah, there," said Morgan, "that comed of sp'iling Bibles.""That comes--as you call it--of being arrant asses," retorted the doctor.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most and best for mankind.
Robert Louis Stevenson