Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

205. “This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

206. “Ice and iron cannot be welded.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

207. “Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

208. “Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying, Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

209. “A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

210. “It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation in my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

211. “To cast in it with Hyde was to die a thousand interests and aspirations.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

212. “When I am grown to man’s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

213. “It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

214. “Since hate poisons the soul, don’t cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

215. “Here it is about gentlemen of fortune. They lives rough, and they risk swinging, but they eat and drink like fighting-cocks, and when a cruise is done, why, it’s hundreds of pounds instead of hundreds of farthings in their pockets.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

216. “God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

217. “I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. 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 futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

218. “It is better to be a fool than to be dead.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

219. “Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

220. “A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

221. “If you would grow great and stately, You must try to walk sedately.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

222. “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. After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active good-will with the lazy cruelty of their neglect. And.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

223. “A great part of life consists of contemplating what we cannot cure.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

224. “Both sides of me were in dead earnest.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

225. “I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

227. “Is there anything in life so disenchanting as achievement?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

228. “There was something strange in my sensations, indescribably new and incredibly sweet. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be tenfold more wicked and the thought delighted me like wine.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

229. “There’s never a man looked me between the eyes and seen a good day a’terward” – Long John Silver.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

230. “Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

231. “It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity;.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

232. “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

233. “You start a question, and it’s like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others...”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

234. “I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

235. “It offended him both as a lawyer and as a lover of the sane and customary sides of life, to whom the fanciful was the immodest.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

236. “The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

237. “And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

238. “How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

239. “I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

240. “Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among roots, the maiden-fair, Wine-scented and poetic soul Of the capacious salad bowl.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

241. “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.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

242. “Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

243. “I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

244. “The child that is not clean and neat, With lots of toys and things to eat, He is a naughty child, I’m sure – Or else his dear Papa is poor.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

245. “Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this “ignoble tobagie” as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

246. “Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

247. “You’re either my ship’s cook-and then you were treated handsome-or Cap’n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

248. “Jealousy is the most radical primeval and naked form of admiration in war paint, so to speak.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

249. “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

250. “O God! I screamed, and “O God! Again and again; for there before my eyes – pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death – there stood Henry Jekyll.””

— Robert Louis Stevenson