“Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.”
Quote by Robert Louis Stevenson
“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.”
“A boy has to peddle his book.”
“Talent, and genius as well, is like a grain of pearl sand shifting about in the creative mind. A valued tormentor.”