Robert Louis Stevenson: Trending quotes

Robert Louis Stevenson trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Robert Louis Stevenson: 236 quotes10 likes

“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 book Virginibus Puerisque

Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“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

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book The Wrong Box

The Wrong Box, ch. 7 (1889).

“It seems as if marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant, what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this — that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Virginibus Puerisque

Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 1.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book The Master of Ballantrae

The Master of Ballantrae, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book Treasure Island

Source: Treasure Island (1883), Ch. 15, The Man of the Island.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses

My Shadow, st. 1.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

“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 book An Inland Voyage

An Inland Voyage (1878), Ch. III, "The Royal Sport Nautique".

“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 book Memories and Portraits

Memories and Portraits, ch. IV. A College Magazine (1887).

“My body which my dungeon is,
And yet my parks and palaces: —
Which is so great that there I go
All the day long to and fro.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Underwoods

Pt. I, My Body Which My Dungeon Is.
Underwoods (1887)

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

An Apology for Idlers.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“Youth now flees on feathered foot.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

To Will H. Low, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“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

Prayer, inscribed on the bronze memorial to Stevenson in St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book The Silverado Squatters

The Silverado Squatters.

“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

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“The pleasant Land of Counterpane.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book The Land of Counterpane

The Land of Counterpane, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“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?”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Treasure Island

and I lived on rum, I tell you.
Source: Treasure Island (1883), Ch. 3, The Black Spot.

“I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“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 book Across the Plains

Source: Across the Plains (1892), Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.