Top 500 Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “He had taken me aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every month if I would only keep my “weather-eye open for a seafaring man with one leg” and let him know the moment he appeared.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

402. “But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

403. “Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

404. “Happiness, eternal or temporal, is not the reward that mankind seeks, Happinesses are but his wayside companions. His soul is in the journey and in the struggle.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

411. “There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire the warm and palpitating facts of life.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

412. “I slept after the prostration of the day, with a stringent and profound slumber which not even the nightmares that wrung me could avail to break.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

414. “Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

415. “The obscurest epoch is to-day.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

416. “I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

417. “Do not forget that even as “to work is to worship” so to be cheery is to worship also, and to be happy is the first step to being pious.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

418. “But a word once spoken who can recapture it?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

419. “Had be been Shakespeare, he would then have written Troilus and Cressidato brand the offending sex; but being only a little dog, he began to bite them.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

420. “The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out of view, on the other side of the next cove; and what greatly encouraged me, it was in an opposite direction from that whence the blind man had made his appearance and whither he had presumably returned. We were not many minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped to lay hold of each other and hearken. But there was no unusual sound – nothing but the low wash of the ripple and the croaking of the inmates of the wood.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

421. “One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal Green – one more, and my bosom Feels new life with an ecstasy.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

422. “Her eyes took hold upon mine and clung there, and bound us together like the joining of hands; and the moments we thus stood face to face, drinking each other in, were sacramental and the wedding of souls.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

423. “When the teeth are shut the tongue is at home.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

425. “Overhead, the wild huntsman of the storm passed continuously in one blare of mingled noises; screaming wind, straining timber, lashing rope’s end, pounding block and bursting sea contributed; and I could have thought there was at times another, a more piercing, a more human note, that dominated all, like the wailing of an angel; I could have thought I knew the angel’s name, and that his wings were black.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

426. “Not every man is so great a coward as he thinks he is – nor yet so good a Christian.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

427. “Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

428. “You may lay to that.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

429. “It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

430. “Going for character: why not now, and where you stand?”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

431. “The workpeople, to be sure, were most annoyingly slow, but time cured that.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

432. “Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

433. “Then it was that there came into my head the first of the mad notions that contributed so much to saving our lives.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

434. “A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

435. “We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. It’s trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But there’s no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, that’s my view.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

436. “Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to another.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

437. “Several times we shipped a little water, and my breeches and the tails of my coat were all soaking wet before we had gone a hundred yards.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

438. “A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

439. “Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

440. “So I must have lain for hours, continually beaten to and fro upon the billows, now and again wetted with flying sprays, and never ceasing to expect death at the next plunge.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

441. “No baggage – there was the secret of existence.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

442. “A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

443. “By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

444. “I cannot tell if I was more tired or more grateful. Both at least, I was: tired as I never was before that night; and grateful to Gd as I trust I have been often, though never with more cause.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

445. “It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

446. “I saw what I saw, I heard what I heard, and my soul sickened at it; and yet now when that sight has faded from my eyes, I ask myself if I believe it, and I cannot answer.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

447. “There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits in a man’s mind, and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the thing he wanted. She had wonderful bright eyes like stars, and I daresay the eyes had a part in it; but what I remember the most clearly was the way her lips were a trifle open as she turned. And, whatever was the cause, I stood there staring like a fool.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

448. “Yes,” he thought; “he is a doctor, he must know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge is more than he can bear.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

449. “And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for thought.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

450. “We are all such as He was – the inheritors of sin; we must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there is in all of us – ay, even in me – a sparkle of the divine. Like Him, we must endure for a little while, until morning returns bringing peace.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson