Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes - Page 3

I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. 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; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. 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
Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity,
Robert Louis Stevenson
I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyone lives by selling something.
Robert Louis Stevenson
No baggage - there was the secret of existence.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.
Robert Louis Stevenson
He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration.
Robert Louis Stevenson
But besides that I was of an unforgiving disposition from my birth, slow to take offense, slower to forget it, and now incensed both against my companion and myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank You for this place in which we dwell, for the love accorded us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors; if it may not, give us strength to endure that which is to come that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another. We beseech of you this help and mercy for Christ's sake.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words.
Robert Louis Stevenson
These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse.  Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable.  The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature.  The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs.  He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
Robert Louis Stevenson
I have lost confidence in myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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?
Robert Louis Stevenson
Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
We must go on, because we can't turn back.
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
Wine is bottled poetry
Robert Louis Stevenson
A good conscience is eight parts of courage.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.
Robert Louis Stevenson
We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
Robert Louis Stevenson
Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.  Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
Robert Louis Stevenson
Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?
Robert Louis Stevenson
... Man is not truly one, but truly two... even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both...
Robert Louis Stevenson
We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Well! marriage is like death, it comes to all.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Three,' reckoned the captain, 'ourselves make seven, counting Hawkins, here. Now, about honest hands?'Most likely Trelawney's own men," said the doctor; 'those he had picked up for himself, before he lit on Silver.'Nay,' replied the squire. 'Hands was one of mine.'I did think I could have trusted Hands,' added the captain.
Robert Louis Stevenson
And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he had remembered something."The score!" he burst out. "Three goes o' rum! Why, shiver my timbers, if I hadn't forgotten my score!"And, falling on a bench, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining; and we laughed together, peal after peal, until the tavern rang again.
Robert Louis Stevenson
From the bonny bells of heather,They brewed a drink long syne,Was sweeter far than honey,Was stronger far than wine.They brewed it and they drank it,And lay in blessed swound,For days and days together,In their dwellings underground.There rose a King in Scotland,A fell man to his foes,He smote the Picts in battle,He hunted them like roes.Over miles of the red mountainHe hunted as they fled,And strewed the dwarfish bodiesOf the dying and the dead.Summer came in the country,Red was the heather bell,But the manner of the brewing,Was none alive to tell.In graves that were like children’sOn many a mountain’s head,The Brewsters of the HeatherLay numbered with the dead.The king in the red moorlandRode on a summer’s day;And the bees hummed and the curlewsCried beside the way.The King rode and was angry,Black was his brow and pale,To rule in a land of heather,And lack the Heather Ale.It fortuned that his vassals,Riding free upon the heath,Came on a stone that was fallenAnd vermin hid beneath.Roughly plucked from their hiding,Never a word they spoke:A son and his aged father –Last of the dwarfish folk.The king sat high on his charger,He looked down on the little men;And the dwarfish and swarthy coupleLooked at the king again.Down by the shore he had them:And there on the giddy brink –“I will give thee life ye vermin,For the secret of the drink.”There stood the son and fatherAnd they looked high and low;The heather was red around them,The sea rumbled below.And up spoke the father,Shrill was his voice to hear:“I have a word in private,A word for the royal ear.“Life is dear to the aged,And honour a little thing;I would gladly sell the secret”,Quoth the Pict to the King.His voice was small as a sparrow’s,And shrill and wonderful clear:“I would gladly sell my secret,Only my son I fear.“For life is a little matter,And death is nought to the young;And I dare not sell my honour,Under the eye of my son.Take him, O king, and bind him,And cast him far in the deep;And it’s I will tell the secretThat I have sworn to keep.”They took the son and bound him,Neck and heels in a thong,And a lad took him and swung him,And flung him far and strongAnd the sea swallowed his body,Like that of a child of ten;And there on the cliff stood the father,Last of the dwarfish men.“True was the word I told you:Only my son I feared;For I doubt the sapling courage,That goes without the beard.But now in vain is the torture,Fire shall not avail:Here dies in my bosomThe secret of the Heather Ale.
Robert Louis Stevenson
For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Alan," cried I, "what makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow?"Deed, and I don't, know" said Alan. "For just precisely what I thought I liked about ye, was that ye never quarrelled:—and now I like ye better!
Robert Louis Stevenson
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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!
Robert Louis Stevenson
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!
Robert Louis Stevenson
Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis Stevenson
An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils".
Robert Louis Stevenson
A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The VagabondGive to me the life I love,Let the lave go by me,Give the jolly heaven aboveAnd the byway nigh me.Bed in the bush with stars to see,Bread I dip in the river -There's the life for a man like me,There's the life for ever.Let the blow fall soon or late,Let what will be o'er me;Give the face of earth aroundAnd the road before me.Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,Nor a friend to know me;All I seek, the heaven aboveAnd the road below me.Or let autumn fall on meWhere afield I linger,Silencing the bird on tree,Biting the blue finger.White as meal the frosty field -Warm the fireside haven -Not to autumn will I yield,Not to winter even!Let the blow fall soon or late,Let what will be o'er me;Give the face of earth around,And the road before me.Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,Nor a friend to know me;All I ask, the heaven aboveAnd the road below me.
Robert Louis Stevenson
REQUIEMUnder the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he long'd to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
Robert Louis Stevenson
Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
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
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.
Robert Louis Stevenson
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
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