Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation say under shelter.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

152. “Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

154. “Life is not a matter of holding good cards.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

156. “Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

157. “Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

158. “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

159. “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

160. “It takes hard writing to make easy reading.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

161. “A child should always say what’s true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

162. “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

163. “I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

164. “They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

165. “So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

166. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

167. “Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

168. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

169. “The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

170. “Being happy enables you to be free from domination by the outside world.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

171. “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

172. “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

173. “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

174. “The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

175. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

176. “The secret to a happiness is a small ego. And a big wallet. Good wine helps, too. But that’s not really a secret, is it?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

177. “Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

178. “You must suffer me to go my own dark way. I have brought on myself a punishment and a danger that I cannot name. If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also. I could not think that this earth contained a place for sufferings and terrors so unmanning;.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

180. “I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

181. “Thems that die’ll be the lucky ones.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

182. “Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

183. “The fog still slept on the wing above the drowned city, where the lamps glimmered like carbuncles; and through the muffle and smother of these fallen clouds, the procession of the town’s life was still rolling in through the great arteries with a sound as of a mighty wind.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

184. “Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

185. “If this is death, it is easier than life.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

186. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

187. “Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

188. “The friendly cow, all red and white, I love with all my heart; She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

189. “To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not how we end, of what we want and not what we have.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

190. “If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

191. “Mr. Hyde was pale and dwarfish, he gave an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation, he had a displeasing smile, he had borne himself to the lawyer with a sort of murderous mixture of timidity and boldness, and he spoke with a husky, whispering and somewhat broken voice; all these were points against him, but not all of these together could explain the hitherto unknown disgust, loathing and fear with which Mr. Utterson regarded him.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

192. “An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

193. “In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way I have to go to bed by day.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

194. “Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

195. “A man cannot destroy the savage in him by denying its impulses. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

196. “I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

197. “It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

198. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

199. “Watch for the ace of spades, which is the sign of death, and the ace of clubs, which designates the official of the night.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

200. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson