Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

302. “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

303. “Nothing made by brute force lasts.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

304. “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

305. “This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

307. “It is not enough to be ready to go where duty calls. A man should stand around where he can hear the call!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

308. “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

309. “This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

310. “Mostly he would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow through his nose like a fog-horn;.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

311. “Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

312. “Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

314. “Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

315. “I was still cursed with my duality of purpose.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

316. “When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

317. “I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

318. “The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

319. “Hosts loved to detain the dry lawyer, when the light-hearted and loose-tongued had already their foot on the threshold; they liked to sit awhile in his unobtrusive company, practicing for solitude, sobering their minds in the man’s rich silence after the expense and strain of gaiety.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

320. “Watch for the ace of spades, which is the sign of death, and the ace of clubs, which designates the official of the night. Happy, happy young men!” he added. “You have good.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

321. “To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

322. “The spirit of delight comes in small ways.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

323. “Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest – Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

324. “And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

325. “The sticks break, the stones crumble, The eternal altars tilt and tumble, Sanctions and tales dislimn like mist About the amazed evangelist. He stands unshook from age to youth Upon one pin-point of the truth.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

326. “The bourgeoisie’s weapon is starvation. If as a writer or artist you run counter to their narrow notions they simplyand silently withdraw your means of subsistence. I sometimes wonder how many people of talent are executed in this way every year.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

327. “Once I guessed right, And I got credit by’t; Thrice I guessed wrong, And I kept my credit on.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

328. “They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener; and so when each had said his say, my mother.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

329. “A trifle more of that man,’he would say,’and I shall explode.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

330. “To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

331. “In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

332. “The spirit, Sir, is one of mockery.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

333. “Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought, sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us, but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange as our actual adventures.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

334. “To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

335. “Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

336. “It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

337. “For will anyone dare to tell me that business is more entertaining than fooling among boats? He must have never seen a boat, or never seen an office, who says so.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

338. “A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

339. “In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

340. “We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable – not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

341. “If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

342. “It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

343. “That was Flint’s treasure that we had come so far to seek, and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the ammassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

344. “The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

345. “It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

346. “I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

347. “The bold may not live long, but the timid never live at all.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

348. “Make up your mind to be happy.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

349. “Even if the doctor does not give you a year, even if he hesitates about a month, make one brave push and see what can be accomplished in a week.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

350. “There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson