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Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes
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Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, musician and travel writer. His most famous works are Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and A Child's Garden of Verses. Stevenson was a literary celebrity during his lifetime, and now ranks as the 26th most translated author in the world. His works have been admired by many other writers, including Jorge Luis Borges, Bertolt Brecht, Marcel Proust, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, Cesare Pavese, Emilio Salgari, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said that Stevenson "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins".

✵ 13. November 1850 – 3. December 1894  •  Other names Robert L. Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson photo
Robert Louis Stevenson: 118 quotes10 likes

Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses

Happy Thought.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

“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

Old Mortality (1884).

“The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple-tart.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses

The Cow, st. 1.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book An Inland Voyage

An Inland Voyage (1878).

“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 book The Wrong Box

The Wrong Box, ch. 8.

“Them that die will be the lucky ones!”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Treasure Island

Source: Treasure Island (1883), Ch. 20, Silver's Embassy.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

“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

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

“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

314.
Aes Triplex (1878)

“Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight,
The great artificer
Made my mate.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Songs of Travel and Other Verses

No. XXVI, My Wife.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)

“A child should always say what's true
And speak when he is spoken to,
And behave mannerly at table;
At least as far as he is able.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses

Whole Duty of Children.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

“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 book The Suicide Club

The New Arabian Nights. The Suicide Club (1882)

“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 book Kidnapped

Kidnapped, ch. 14 (1886).

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book Treasure Island

Source: Treasure Island (1883), Ch. 3.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book The Master of Ballantrae

The Master of Ballantrae. Mr. Mackellar's Journey (1889).

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

“Dear Andrew, with the brindled hair
Who glory to have thrown in air,
High over arm, the trembling reed,
By Ale and Kail, by Till and Tweed.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Underwoods

Bk. I, To Andrew Lang.
Underwoods (1887)

“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

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

“Of all my verse, like not a single line;
But like my title, for it is not mine.
That title from a better man I stole:
Ah, how much better, had I stol'n the whole!”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Underwoods

Title page poem
Underwoods (1887)

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

El Dorado.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book Prince Otto

Prince Otto, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses

Bed in Summer, st. 1.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

“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

315.
Aes Triplex (1878)

“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

314.
Aes Triplex (1878)

“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.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book A Child's Garden of Verses

Good and Bad Children, st. 1.
A Child's Garden of Verses (1885)

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

Robert Louis Stevenson book Songs of Travel and Other Verses

No. XLV, S.R. Crockett.
Songs of Travel and Other Verses (1896)

“There is but one art, to omit.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

As cited in The Harper Book of Quotations, Revised Edition (1993), Ed. R. Fitzhenry, HarperCollins, p. 498 : ISBN 0062732137, 9780062732132

“Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Treasure Island

Source: Treasure Island (1883), Ch. 10, The Voyage.

“Am I no a bonny fighter?”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Kidnapped

Kidnapped, ch. 10 (1886).

“A good conscience is eight parts of courage.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book Catriona

Catriona, ch. XI (1893).