Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

Don't ever confuse motion with progress.

Do not forget that even as "to work is to worship" so to be cheery is to worship also, and to be happy is the first step to being pious.

To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.

Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity.

O wind, a-blowing all day long, O wind, that sings so loud a song!

To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire.

A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.

Anyone can carry their burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do their work, however hard, for one day.

Once I guessed right, And I got credit by't; Thrice I guessed wrong, And I kept my credit on.

If you would grow great and stately, You must try to walk sedately.

-I am not sure whether he's sane. -If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.

My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring

But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life.

His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.

And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.

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

I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered.

There's never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a'terward.

I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.

You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very strange - a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.

And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

I hate to write, but I love to have written.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

You're either my ship's cook-and then you were treated handsome-or Cap'n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!

For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all impudences of the brawling world reach you no more.

I wish these flies would piss off.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.

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.

The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.

If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.

my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head, Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night That somehow the right is the right And the smooth shall bloom from the rough: Lord, if that were enough?

And my heart springs up anew, Bright and confident and true, And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew.

To cast in it with Hyde was to die a thousand interests and aspirations.

Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them.

Away with funeral music-set The pipe to powerful lips- The cup of life's for him that drinks And not for him that sips.

All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for and the public curiosity is sure to welcome.

The spirit, Sir, is one of mockery.

Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse.

Courage, the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand.

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

The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense.

But of works of art little can be said.

This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still.

We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.

Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.