“Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.”
“Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other to try the manners of different nations; to hear the chimes at midnight; to see the sunrise in town and country; to be converted at a revival; to circumnavigate the metaphysics, write halting verses, run a mile to see a fire, and wait all day long in the theatre to applaud Hernani.”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“Flower god, god of the spring, beautiful, bountiful,
Cold-dyed shield in the sky, lover of versicles,
Here I wander in April
Cold, grey-headed; and still to my
Heart, Spring comes with a bound, Spring the deliverer,
Spring, song-leader in woods, chorally resonant;
Spring, flower-planter in meadows,
Child-conductor in willowy
Fields deep dotted with bloom, daisies and crocuses:
Here that child from his heart drinks of eternity:
O child, happy are children!”
Source: New Poems and Variant Readings
“When the grass was closely mown,
Walking on the lawn alone,
In the turf a hole I found,
And hid a soldier underground.
Spring and daisies came apace;
Grasses hide my hiding place;
Grasses run like a green sea
O'er the lawn up to my knee.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?”
“A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.”
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
“In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfies
See the smoke trail!
Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
the grey smoke towers.
Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all,
Flowers in the summer
Fires in the fall!”
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
“An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.”
Source: The Essential Travel Writings (Annotated Edition)
“I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board.”
“Saints are sinners who kept on going.”
“I lived on rum, I tell you. It's been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me.”
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
“All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.”
“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.”
Source: The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays
“It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first time after long, like the flowers in spring, to reawaken in us the sharp edge of sense and that impression of mystic strangeness which otherwise passes out of life with the coming of years; but the sight of a loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The Merry Men and Other Stories
“Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse.”
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 make our morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow men a secret element of gusto.”
Source: A Christmas Sermon
“If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.”
Source: Across the Plains
“All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.”
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 avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, second edition
“Keep busy at something: a busy person never has time to be unhappy.”
“Since hate poisons the soul, don't cherish enmities or grudges: avoid people who make you unhappy.”
“Sing a song of seasons; something bright in all, flowers in the summer, fires in the fall.”
Source: Robert Louis Stevenson
“We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed that not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun.”
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
“It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.”
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
“Restfulness is a quality for cattle; the virtues are all active, life is alert.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“To believe in immortality is one thing, but it is first needful to believe in life.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realised, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection.”
“To love is the great amulet that makes this world a garden.”
“Children are certainly too good to be true.”
Source: The Collected Letters (Annotated Edition)
“You can kill the body, but not the spirit.”
“The essence of love is kindness.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.”
“An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“In the law of God, there is no statute of limitations.”
Source: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
“So soon as prudence has begun to grow up in the brain, like a dismal fungus, it finds its first expression in a paralysis of generous acts.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things.”
“In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way
I have to go to bed by day.”
“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!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside.
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown-
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!”
“Live life to the fullest.”
“A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.”
Source: The Body Snatcher and Other Tales
“The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances.”
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 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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated)
“The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.”
Source: Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)
“Do not write merely to be understood. Write so you cannot possibly be misunderstood.”
“The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.”
Source: Essays in the Art of Writing(illustrated)
“No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature.”
“When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.”
