Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “It was no longer the fear of the gallows, it was the horror of being Hyde that racked me.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

252. “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

253. “He was wild when he was young; a long while ago to be sure; but in the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

254. “Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

255. “Am I no a bonny fighter?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

256. “This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

257. “When the grass was closely mown, Walking on the lawn alone, In the turf a hole I found, And hid a soldier underground. Spring and daisies came apace; Grasses hide my hiding place; Grasses run like a green sea O’er the lawn up to my knee.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

258. “He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

259. “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

260. “I believe in an ultimate decency of things.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

261. “And my heart springs up anew, Bright and confident and true, And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

262. “The man who came with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could learn of our guest.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

264. “The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

265. “I incline to Cain’s heresy,′ he used to say quaintly: ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.’ In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

266. “Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

267. “Everything is true; only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

268. “A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life’s choicest blessings.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

269. “He put the glass to his lips and drank at one gulp. A cry followed; he reeled, staggered, clutched at the table and held on, staring with injected eyes, gasping with open mouth; and as I looked there came, I thought, a change – he seemed to swell – his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter – and the next moment, I had sprung to my feet and leaped back against the wall, my arms raised to shield me from that prodigy, my mind submerged in terror. “O.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

270. “Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

271. “Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

272. “I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

273. “The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

274. “It is the mark of a modest man to accept his friendly circle ready-made from the hands of opportunity; and that was the lawyer’s way. 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

275. “When Christ came into my life, I came about like a well-handled ship.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

276. “Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

277. “Black mail I suppose; an honest man paying through the nose for some of the capers of his youth. Black Mail House is what I call the place with the door, in consequence.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

278. “But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. ‘I incline to Cain’s heresy,’ he used to say quaintly: ‘I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

279. “When we look in to the long avenue of the future, and see the good there is for each one of us to do, we realize, after all, what a beautiful thing it is to work, and to live, and to be happy.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

280. “Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

281. “His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

282. “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

283. “Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

284. “You can’t begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning: that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

285. “We are not content to pass away entirely from the scenes of our delight; we would leave, if but in gratitude, a pillar and a legend.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

286. “Utterson became so used to the unvarying character of these reports, that he fell off little by little in the frequency of his visits.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

287. “To love playthings well as a child, to lead an adventurous and honorable youth, and to settle when the time arrives, into a green and smiling age, is to be a good artis en life and deserve well of yourself and your neighbor.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

288. “We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

289. “When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

290. “Nothing made by brute force lasts.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

291. “The very flexibility and ease which make men’s friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

292. “The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

293. “Dead men don’t bite.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

294. “When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

295. “So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

296. “The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

297. “It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

298. “We can only know others by ourselves.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

299. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

300. “With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night That somehow the right is the right And the smooth shall bloom from the rough: Lord, if that were enough?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson