Robert Louis Stevenson: Likeness

“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

A Gossip on Romance http://pages.prodigy.net/rogers99/rls_gossip_on_romance.html, printed in Longman's Magazine (November 1882).

Books , Sleep , Reading , Dance

“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

'La Fère of Cursed Memory', 15th vignette of An Inland Voyage (1878), in Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/8026833953, Stevenson, e-artnow (2015)

“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 book Across the Plains

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

People , Dependency

“It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say.”

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

People , Fools , Personality , Indifference

“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)

Music , Thinking

“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)

“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)

Health

“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)

Life , Marriage , World , Dreams

“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)

“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).

Way , Learning

“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)

Love , Men , Nature

“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.

Men , Sea

“Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.”

Robert Louis Stevenson book The Silverado Squatters

Toils And Pleasures.
The Silverado Squatters (1883)

Departure , Night