Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “O wind, a-blowing all day long, O wind, that sings so loud a song!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

102. “All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

103. “I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

104. “Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

105. “We must accept life for what it actually is – a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

106. “The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

108. “The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

109. “Every man has a sane spot somewhere.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

110. “When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

111. “We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

112. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

113. “There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

116. “Of what shall we be proud of if we are not proud of our friends?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

117. “If they only married when they fell in love, most people would die unwed.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

119. “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

120. “We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

121. “There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

122. “In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

123. “Cruel children, crying babies, All grow up as geese and gabies, Hated, as their age increases, By their nephews and their nieces.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

124. “My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky; It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by; For every night at tea-time and before you take your seat, With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

125. “I was slowly losing hold of my original and better self, and becoming slowly incorporated with my second and worse.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

126. “Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

128. “Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

129. “There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

130. “And this shall be for music when no one else is near, The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear! That only I remember, that only you admire, Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

131. “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Featured in: Hiking Quotes

133. “It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard frosts and heavy gales;.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

134. “He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

135. “Instantly the spirit of hell awoke in me and raged. With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow; and it was not till weariness had begun to succeed, that I was suddenly, in the top fit of my delirium, struck through the heart by a cold thrill of terror.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

136. “Whenever the moon and stars are set, Whenever the wind is high, All night long in the dark and wet, A man goes riding by.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

137. “Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

139. “God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns someone other than myself.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

140. “The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

141. “I smoke a pipe abroad, because To all cigars I much prefer it, And as I scorn you social laws, My choice has nothing to deter it.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

142. “If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

143. “All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

144. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

145. “I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Featured in: Reading Quotes

146. “Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said – On wings they are carried – After the singer is dead And the maker buried.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

148. “The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

149. “I thought it was madness,” he said, as he replaced the obnoxious paper in the safe, “and now I begin to fear it is disgrace.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

150. “The smack of California earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson