Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “God bless me, the man seems hardly human! Something troglodytic, shall we say?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

206. “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

207. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

209. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

211. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

213. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

218. “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

219. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

229. “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

230. “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

231. “And life is all a variorum, at the best.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

232. “Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

233. “I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgment.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful reinvasion of darkness, seemed, in the lawyer’s eyes, like a district of some city in a nightmare.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

239. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

241. “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

242. “To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

243. “His affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

244. “Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother’s corpse.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

245. “I lived on rum, I tell you. It’s been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

246. “The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night: and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

247. “E accadde a me come accade a tanta parte dei miei simili, di scegliere la parte migliore e di non avere la forza necessaria a tenerla invita.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

248. “And every day when I’ve been good, I get an orange after food.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

249. “It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

250. “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