Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

We must go on, because we can't turn back.

I have lost confidence in myself.

But besides that I was of an unforgiving disposition from my birth, slow to take offense, slower to forget it, and now incensed both against my companion and myself.

No baggage - there was the secret of existence.

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

Ah, there, " said Morgan, "that comed of sp'iling Bibles.""That comes--as you call it--of being arrant asses, " retorted the doctor.

Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

... I deny your right to put words into my mouth.

To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times, And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.

...with a strong strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier.

Don't you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?

You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.

Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

There is a romance about all those who are abroad in the black hours.

I believe you to be strictly honorable.'He thoughtfully emptied his cup. 'I wish I could add you were intelligent, ' he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.

The rain is falling all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea.

It is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a flying enemy

No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.

Doctors is all swabs.

This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?

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.

It is very nice to think The world is full of meat and drink With little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place.

I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

Keep your fears to yourself but share your courage with others.

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

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank not as a prophet but as an unteachable brat well birched and none the wiser.

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.

To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and fall.

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.

So long as we love we serve so long as we are loved by others I would almost say that we are indispensable and no man is useless while he has a friend.

A friend is a present you give to yourself.

Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.

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.

Under the wide and starry sky Dig the grave and let me lie.

There is no duty so much underrated as the duty of being happy.

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

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily one thing leading to another in an endless series.

Extreme busyness whether at school or college kirk or market is a symptom of deficient vitality and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

The cruellest lies are often told in silence.

Marriage is one long conversation checkered by disputes.

If your morals make you dreary depend on it they are wrong.

I have resolved that from this day on I will do all the business I can honestly have all the fun I can reasonably do all the good I can willingly and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.

A generous prayer is never presented in vain the petition may be refused but the petitioner is always I believe rewarded by some gracious visitation.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying "Amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to keep your soul alive.