“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?”
“When you've got nowhere to turn, turn on the gas.”
Source: Answered Prayers
“That's the difference between the serious artist and the craftsman--the craftsman can take material and because of his abilities do a professional job of it. The serious artist, like Proust, is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He's obsessed by his material; it's like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.”
Source: Truman Capote: Conversations
“In his prime, the young comic walked onto a stage with the confidence of a man who owned it, and by the time he walked off, he did.”
“Branch Rickey made me a better man.”