“Jew storekeepers have already learned the advantage to be gained from this [unlimited credit]: they lead on the farmer into irretrievable indebtedness, and keep him ever after as their bondslave hopelessly grinding in the mill.”
Source: Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson: Autobiographical Writings and Essays by the prolific Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, author of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped & Catriona
“All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.”
Source: The complete short stories
“If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.”
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
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men.”
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
“If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tobagie" as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world.”
“It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very foremost badge of modern civilization--the Urim and Thummim of respectability. . . . So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.”
Source: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Third Edition
“Once I guessed right, And I got credit by't; Thrice I guessed wrong, And I kept my credit on.”
“Youth is wholly experimental.”
Source: Across the Plains
“A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.”
Source: Virginibus Puerisque
“The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail.”
“It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is... to live forever.”
Source: Dreams of elsewhere: the selected travel writings of Robert Louis Stevenson
“The world was made before English language, and seemingly upon a different design.”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“The true success is to labour.”
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“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.”
“If this is death, it is easier than life.”
“When the teeth are shut the tongue is at home.”
Source: Fables: Stevenson's Vol. 18
“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.”
Source: South Sea Tales
“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.”
Source: Familiar Studies of Men and Books: Stevenson's Vol. 16
“The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it inourhearts either tomarry or not tomarry.Marriage isterrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.”
“Ice and iron cannot be welded.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“If a man knows he will sooner or later be robbed upon a journey, he will have a bottle of the best in every inn, and look upon all his extravagances as so much gained upon the thieves.”
“Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it were as respectableasthe Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned.”
“Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness.”
“Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush with the stars to see, Bread I dip in the river There's the life for a man like me, There's the life for ever.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Youth now flees on feathered foot.”
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
“Times are changed with him who marries; there are no more by-path meadows, where you may innocently linger, but the road lies long and straight and dusty to the grave. Idleness, which is often becoming and even wise in the bachelor, begins to wear a different aspect when you have a wife to support.”
“This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.”
Source: Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson: Autobiographical Writings and Essays by the prolific Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, author of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped & Catriona
“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.”
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
“We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity. In real life, help is given out of friendship, or it is not valued; it is received from the hand of friendship, or it is resented.”
Source: Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson: Autobiographical Writings and Essays by the prolific Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, author of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped & Catriona
“There are, indeed, few merrier spectacles than that of many windmills bickering together in a fresh breeze over a woody country; their halting alacrity of movement, their pleasant business, making bread all day with uncouth gesticulation; their air, gigantically human, as of a creature half alive, put a spirit of romance into the tamest landscape.”
Source: Dreams of elsewhere: the selected travel writings of Robert Louis Stevenson
“We live thetime that a match flickers; we pop the corkof a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?”
“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.”
“The smack of California earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.”
“There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water than his head could carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his wicked old wild sea-songs, minding nobody... Often I have heard the house shaking with Yo-ho-ho and a bottle and rum, all the neighbours joining in for dear life with the fear of death upon them and each singing louder than the other to avoid remark. Fiften men on the dead man's chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil have done for the rest. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!”
“Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a man who does not smoke.”
“Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality.”
“By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.”
“Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers.”
Source: The Pocket R.L.S., Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson
“Give us courage and gaiety and the quient mind . . .”
“Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.”
Source: Collected Memoirs, Travel Sketches and Island Literature of Robert Louis Stevenson: Autobiographical Writings and Essays by the prolific Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, author of Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped & Catriona
