Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the kernel of our system.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

453. “I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

454. “Freedom, to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed, ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to their mines and workshops by the lash of famine.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

455. “Che lo volessi o no, ero omai confinato nella parte migliore della mia esistenza. Quanto godetti di questo pensiero!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

456. “Well! marriage is like death, it comes to all.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

457. “If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

458. “Happiness, eternal or temporal, is not the reward that mankind seeks, Happinesses are but his wayside companions. His soul is in the journey and in the struggle.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

459. “But a word once spoken who can recapture it?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

460. “He was in that humour when a man will cut off his nose to spite his face.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

462. “Call up your vermin to your back, sir, and fall on! The sooner the clash begins, the sooner ye’ll taste this steel throughout your vitals.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

463. “When I was a boy, I was a bit puzzled, and hardly knew weather it was myself or the world that was curious and worth looking into. Now I know that it is myself, and stick to that.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

464. “A friend is somebody who loves us with understanding, as well as emotion.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

465. “Ethics are my veiled mistress; I love them, but know not what they are.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

466. “And a brave lad you were, and smart too,” answered Silver, shaking hands so heartily that all the barrel shook, “and a finer figurehead for a gentleman of fortune I never clapped my eyes on.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

467. “Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

469. “The world was made before English language, and seemingly upon a different design.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

470. “If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

471. “Captain,” said the squire, “the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?” “Strike my colours!” cried the captain. “No, sir, not I;” and, as soon as he had said the words, I think we all agreed with him.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

473. “Rightly looked upon,′ mused Gotthold, ’it is ourselves that we cannot forgive, when we refuse forgiveness to our friend. Some strand of our own misdoing is involved in every quarrel.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

474. “I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father’s house.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

475. “Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

476. “If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

477. “The sun was getting up, and mortal white he looked about the cutwater. But, there he was, and the six all dead – dead and buried.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

478. “And ‘Oh man!’ quo he, ’am I no a bonny fighter?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

479. “The best things in life are nearest, breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

480. “Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering. And.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

481. “To flee was more than I could find courage for; but I registered a vow of unsleeping circumspection.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

482. “It is always a bad sign when the lower classes laugh: their taste in humour is both poor and sinister;.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

483. “SQUIRE TRELAWNEY, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

484. “He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

485. “Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o’ goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; them’s my views – amen, so be it. And.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

486. “I never seen good come o’ goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

487. “It is the proof of intelligence, the proof of not being a barbarian, to be able to enter into something outside of oneself, something that does not touch one’s next neighbour in the city omnibus.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

488. “Do you call that a head on your shoulders, or a blessed dead-eye?” cried Long John. “Don’t rightly know, don’t you! Perhaps you don’t happen to rightly know who you was speaking to, perhaps? Come, now, what was he jawing – v’yages, cap’ns, ships? Pipe up! What was it?” “We.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

489. “He himself slept peacefully and snored aloud, yet my heart was sore for him, wicked as he was, to think on the dark perils that environed and the shameful gibbet that awaited him.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

490. “Indeed, that is the first principle of vengeance; and hatred betrayed is hatred impotent.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

491. “Dreadful stories they were – about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

492. “He was a very silent man by custom.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

493. “I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

494. “The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; it but shook the doors of the prisonhouse of my disposition; and like the captives of Philippi, that which stood within ran forth.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

495. “Here he lies where he longs to be, home is the sailor, home from sea, and the hunter, home from the hill.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

496. “He came up to me with open arms. “Come to my arms!” he cried, and embraced and kissed me hard upon both cheeks. “David,” said he, “I love you like a brother. And O, man,” he cried in a kind of ecstasy, “am I no a bonny fighter?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

497. “The man’s tongue is fit to frighten the French. Another.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

498. “The name of Captain Flint, though it was strange to me, was well enough known to some there and carried a great weight of terror.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

499. “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasure. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

500. “I lay down flat in the bottom of that wretched skiff and devoutly recommended my spirit to its Maker. At the end of the straits, I made sure we must fall into some bar of raging breakers, where all my troubles would be ended speedily; and though I could, perhaps, bear to die, I could not bear to look upon my fate as it approached.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson