Robert Louis Stevenson cytaty

strona 3

„Lepiej podróżować z nadzieją niż przybyć do celu.”

„Zbyt często związujemy się z kobietami parą jedwabnych pończoch.”

„Małżeństwo w tym jest podobne do życia, że to pole walki, a nie grządka róż.”

„Talary! Talary! Talary!”

„Jeżeli pozwolicie, żeby jakiś człowiek mówił dostatecznie długo, to znajdzie wyznawców.”

„Tak długo jak jesteśmy kochani, jesteśmy niezastąpieni; i żaden człowiek nie jest bezużyteczny, jeśli ma przyjaciela.”

„Nie możesz uciec przed słabościami, musisz je zwalczyć lub zginąć. I jeśli tak ma być, czemu nie teraz, tam gdzie stoisz?”

„Piętnastu chłopów na Umrzyka Skrzyni –
Jo-ho-ho! i butelka rumu!”

„Przyjaciel – to prezent, jaki robisz sobie samemu.”

“Them that die will be the lucky ones!”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”