“Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.”
Source: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
“Jealousy is the most radical primeval and naked form of admiration in war paint, so to speak.”
Source: Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes: And, The Amateur Emigrant
“This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality.”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind.”
“Be what you are, and become what you are capable of becoming.”
“The only noble thing a man can do with money is to build a schooner.”
“Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.”
Source: The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses
“The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense.”
Source: South Sea Tales
“Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,
With eyes of gold and bramble-dew,
Steel-true and blade-straight,
The great artificer made my mate.”
“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.”
“I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very strange - a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
“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.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The Merry Men and Other Stories
“Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”
“Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“It is better to be a fool than to be dead.”
“To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honorable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness-these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without which money can buy nothing.”
Source: The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses
“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.”
“Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.”
“A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.”
“When Christ came into my life, I came about like a well-handled ship.”
“I believe in an ultimate decency of things.”
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses
“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.”
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses
“Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory.”
Source: Virginibus Puerisque
“If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.”
Source: The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses
“Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.”
“If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.”
Source: Selected Poetry and Prose of Robert Louis Stevenson
“There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.”
“O wind, a-blowing all day long, O wind, that sings so loud a song!”
Source: The Complete Poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson: A Child's Garden of Verses, Underwoods, Songs of Travel, Ballads and Other Poems by a prolific Scottish writer, author of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped
“Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses
“It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.”
Source: Robert Louis Stevenson
“But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetities, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.”
Source: The Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Plays, Memoirs, Travel Sketches, Letters and Essays (Illustrated Edition): The Entire Opus of Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer, containing Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona and A Child's Garden of Verses
“The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“It blows a snowing gale in the winter of the year;
The boats are on the sea and the crews are on the pier.
The needle of the vane, it is veering to and fro,
A flash of sun is on the veering of the vane.
Autumn leaves and rain,
The passion of the gale.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”
“...those little people, my brownies, who do one half of my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do for myself.”
Source: The works of Robert Louis Stevenson
“The San Francisco Stock Exchange was the place that continuously pumped up the savings of the lower classes into the pockets of the millionaires.”
“You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese-toasted, mostly-and woke up again, and here I were.”
