Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

352. “If we take matrimony at it’s lowest, we regard it as a sort of friendship recognised by the police.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

353. “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

354. “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

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 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

Featured in: Fun Quotes

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “Love- what is love? A great and aching heart; Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

361. “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

362. “When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

364. “Trelawney,” said the doctor, “contrary to all my notions, I believed you have managed to get two honest men on board with you – that man and John Silver.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

366. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

368. “I felt no repugnance- I knew I was wicked, ten times more wicked, and that thought both braced and delighted me.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

369. “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

370. “Now, we know that life is only a stage to play the fool upon as long as the part amuses us. There was one more convenience lacking to modern comfort; a decent, easy way to quit that stage; the back stairs to liberty; or, as I said this moment, Death’s private door.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

376. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “The man’s tongue is fit to frighten the French. Another.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

383. “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

384. “It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

385. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

386. “The best things in life are nearest, breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

387. “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

388. “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

389. “The captain has said too much or he has said too little, and I’m bound to say that I require an explanation of his words.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

390. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

398. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

400. “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