Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

Things looked at patiently from one side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful.

Live life to the fullest.

Going for character: why not now, and where you stand?

He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.

No man is useless while he has a friend.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

When the teeth are shut the tongue is at home.

Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.

Nothing made by brute force lasts.

I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.

Sit loosely in the saddle.

Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.

A great part of this life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.

And every day when I've been good, I get an orange after food.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.

Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life.

Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.

If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife

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.

Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted mostly.

You can kill the body, but not the spirit.

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.

We should strive to go on in fortune and misfortune like a clock during a thunderstorm.

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.

Make up your mind to be happy.

We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.

You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese-toasted, mostly-and woke up again, and here I were.

To miss the joy is to miss everything.

Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tobagie" as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world.

To make our morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret element of gusto.

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.

To be honest...here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude...

Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends?

A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

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.

Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.

The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.