“There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, second edition
“This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The Merry Men and Other Stories
“Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, second edition
“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".”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.”
“O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Classic Unabridged Edition): Psychological thriller by the prolific Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Catriona, The Black Arrow and A Child's Garden of Verses
“To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.”
Source: Kidnapped
“Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.”
Source: Treasure Island (Illustrated Edition): Adventure Tale of Buccaneers and Buried Gold by the prolific Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Kidnapped & Catriona
“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.”
Source: The Collected Letters (Annotated Edition)
“The man is a success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.”
“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.”
Source: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
“To cast in it with Hyde was to die a thousand interests and aspirations.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, El Extraño Caso Del Dr. Jekyll Y Mr. Hyde: English-Spanish Parallel Text Edition
“I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, second edition
“I love this quote uttered by the character Widget in The Night Circus. He credits it to Herr Thiessen but knows it is a literary quote by the another author. "Wine is bottled poetry”
“In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.”
“Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.”
“A good conscience is eight parts of courage.”
Source: David Balfour: Being Memoirs Of His Adventures At Home And Abroad, The Second Part: In Which Are Set Forth His Misfortunes Anent The Appin Murder; His Troubles With Lord Advocate Grant; Captivity On The Bass Rock; Journey Into Holland And France; And Singular Relations With James More Drummond Or Macgregor, A Son Of The Notorious Rob Roy, And His Daughter Catriona
“If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”
Source: Treasure Island
“Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.”
“and he began to understand what a wild game we play in life; he began to understand that a thing once done cannot be undone nor changed by saying "I am sorry!”
“Love- what is love? A great and aching heart; Wrung hands; and silence; and a long despair”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“-I am not sure whether he's sane. -If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.”
“In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.”
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
“You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others.”
Source: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
“Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.”
“Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
“The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.”
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
“I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.”
Source: Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde
“I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.”
Source: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: And Other Stories of the Supernatural
“For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!”
“The obscurest epoch is to-day.”
Source: Lay Morals
“In the harsh face of life faith can read a bracing gospel.”
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
“We can only know others by ourselves.”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours...and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure.”
Source: Virginibus Puerisque ; And, Across the Plains
“When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.”
Source: Familiar Studies of Men and Books: Stevenson's Vol. 16
“It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.”
Source: An Inland Voyage: Stevenson's Vol. 20
“A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.”
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
“To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not how we end, of what we want and not what we have.”
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 advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.”
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
“Away with funeral music-set
The pipe to powerful lips-
The cup of life's for him that drinks
And not for him that sips.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“To be honest, to be kind-to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation-above all, on the same grim condition to keep friends with himself-here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.”
Source: A Christmas Sermon
“The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his teeth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. And how many loves have perished because, from pride, or spite, or diffidence, or that unmanly shame which withholds a man from daring to betray emotion, a lover, at the critical point of the relation, has but hung his head and held his tongue?”
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
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“And my heart springs up anew,
Bright and confident and true,
And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.”
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.”
“After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.”
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 world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die.”
“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.”
“There is but one art, to omit.”
