Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “I felt no repugnance- I knew I was wicked, ten times more wicked, and that thought both braced and delighted me.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

352. “The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man’s bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

353. “No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

354. “You can kill the body but not the spirit.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

355. “You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer’s day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

356. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

358. “I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it’s good fun.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

359. “If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

360. “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

361. “The San Francisco Stock Exchange was the place that continuously pumped up the savings of the lower classes into the pockets of the millionaires.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

362. “Although I express myself with some degree of pleasantry, the purport of my words is entirely serious.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

363. “By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

364. “Youth now flees on feathered foot.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

365. “But besides that I was of an unforgiving disposition from my birth, slow to take offense, slower to forget it, and now incensed both against my companion and myself.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

366. “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

367. “The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

368. “An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils”.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

369. “It was Silver’s voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiostiy, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

370. “The ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together into a dark room.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

371. “Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

372. “We are three very old friends, Lanyon; we shall not live to make others.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

373. “To make our morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret element of gusto.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

374. “If you want a person’s faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

375. “I who all the Winter through, Cherished other loves than you And kept hands with hoary policy in marriage-bed and pew; Now I know the false and true, For the earnest sun looks through, And my old love comes to meet me in the dawning and the dew.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

376. “And he took another swallow of the brandy, shaking his great fair head like a man who looks forward to the worst.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

377. “In the harsh face of life faith can read a bracing gospel.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

378. “There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

379. “Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

380. “You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

381. “It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

382. “Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

383. “A good conscience is eight parts of courage.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

384. “Children are certainly too good to be true.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

385. “Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

386. “Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain, but those who learn much do but skim the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they conceive the dignity of the design – the horror of the living fact fades from their memory. It is we who sit at home with evil who remember, I think, and are warned and pity.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

387. “Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

388. “A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

389. “For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all impudences of the brawling world reach you no more.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

390. “Well, life has been pleasant; I liked it; yes, sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

391. “If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

392. “To the old our mouths are always partly closed; we must swallow our obvious retorts and listen. They sit above our heads, on life’s raised dais, and appeal at once to our respect and pity.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

393. “The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

394. “The obscurest epoch is to-day.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

395. “He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

396. “A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

397. “We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

398. “In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

399. “This is still the strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

400. “The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson