“The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for and the public curiosity is sure to welcome.”
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 spirit, Sir, is one of mockery.”
“When we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side. . . . O toiling hands of mortals! O wearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. 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.”
“Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity.”
“And every day when I've been good, I get an orange after food.”
“We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers-Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building-had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjuct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic-that flatterer of credulity-the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“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.”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“The greatest engineering is the engineering of men.”
“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.”
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 not enough to be ready to go where duty calls. A man should stand around where he can hear the call!”
“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.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches.”
Source: Lay Morals
“And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.”
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
“Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying,
Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now,
Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying,
My heart remembers how!”
“Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle”
Source: A Child's Garden of Verses (ĺ…’ç«Ąč©©ĺś’)
“Whenever the moon and stars are set,
Whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet,
A man goes riding by.”
“If you would grow great and stately,
You must try to walk sedately.”
“It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into his satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of franker appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one eye ever on the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and became man's plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew more and more self-conscious, mannered and affected.”
Source: Memories and Portraits: Stevenson's Vol. 21
“my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.”
Source: A Child's Garden of Verses (Sparklesoup Classics)
“With the half of a broken hope for a pillow at night
That somehow the right is the right
And the smooth shall bloom from the rough:
Lord, if that were enough?”
Source: Songs of Travel: And Other Verses
“Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
Hated, as their age increases,
By their nephews and their nieces.”
Source: A Child's Garden of Verses (Sparklesoup Classics)
“Away down the river,
A hundred miles or more,
Other little children
Shall bring my boats ashore.”
Source: A Child's Garden of Verses (Sparklesoup Classics)
“How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!”
“My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
It's time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
For every night at tea-time and before you take your seat,
With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.”
“The child that is not clean and neat,
With lots of toys and things to eat,
He is a naughty child, I'm sure--
Or else his dear Papa is poor.”
“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.”
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
“Must we to bed indeed? Well then,
Let us arise and go like men,
And face with an undaunted tread
The long black passage up to bed.”
“The physician...is the flower (such as it is) of our civilization.”
“It takes hard writing to make easy reading.”
“Life is not a matter of holding good cards”
“Don't ever confuse motion with progress.”
“Nobody speaks of a beautifful view for 5 minutes”
“Everything is true; only the opposite is true too; you must believe both equally or be damned.”
Source: The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson: July 1884-August 1887
“One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal Green - one more, and my bosom Feels new life with an ecstasy.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said - On wings they are carried - After the singer is dead And the maker buried.”
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
“There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.”
“When we look in to the long avenue of the future, and see the good there is for each one of us to do, we realize, after all, what a beautiful thing it is to work, and to live, and to be happy.”
“Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.”
Source: The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Nineteen Other Tales
“I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?”
Source: The Novels and Tales of Robert Louis Stevenson
“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.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated Edition): Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped, Catriona, The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, The Master of Ballantrae, St Ives: Adventures of a French Prisoner in England…
“They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.”
Source: Treasure Island
“I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.”
Source: Treasure Island (Illustrated)
“We should strive to go on in fortune and misfortune like a clock during a thunderstorm.”
“Going for character: why not now, and where you stand?”
“There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign.”
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
“Make up your mind to be happy.”
“There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well.”
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
“[T]he kingdom of heaven is of the childlike, of those who are easy to please, who love and who give pleasure. Mighty men of their hands, the smiters and the builders and the judges, have lived long and done sternly and yet preserved this lovely character; and among our carpet interests and twopenny concerns, the shame were indelible if we should lose it. Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties.”
“Really don't choose every day from the harvest you experience but from the seeds you plant”
