Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

453. “Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door; Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shore Where neither piping bird nor peeping dawn Disturbs the eternal sleep, But in the stillness far withdrawn Our dreamless rest for evermore we keep.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

454. “It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

455. “It’s a chief principle in military affairs to go where ye are least expected.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

456. “But of works of art little can be said.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

457. “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

458. “Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham – the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

460. “In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

461. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

462. “The woman who can manage, like the man who can fight, must never shrink from an encounter. The knight must not disgrace his weapons.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

463. “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

464. “Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

466. “Nobody speaks of a beautifful view for 5 minutes.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

467. “After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

468. “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

469. “I often think the happiest consequences seem to follow when a gentelman consults his lawyer, and takes all the law allows him.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

470. “I was once more face to face with the big bonfire that occupies the kernel of our system.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

476. “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

477. “I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “If you had the pluck of a weevil in a biscuit, you would catch them!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

487. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

489. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

492. “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

493. “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

494. “For these two were old friends, old mates both at school and college, both thorough respecters of themselves and each other, and, what does not always follow, men who thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

496. “But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

499. “Very well, then, we wish to see his rooms,” said the lawyer; and when the woman began to declare it was impossible, “I had better tell you who this person is,” he added. “This is Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard.”

— 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