Robert Louis Stevenson famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
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Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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A friend is a gift you give yourself.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop scene in a theatre, but a city in the world of reality.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
We consume the carcasses of creatures of like appetites, passions and organs with our own, and fill the slaughterhouses daily with screams of pain and fear.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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!
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Loving God, help us remember the birth of Jesus, that we may share in the song of the angels, the gladness of the shepherds, and the worship of the wise men.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable--not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Do not measure success by today's harvest. Measure success by the seeds you plant today.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
I have resolved that from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Everyday courage has few witnesses. But yours is no less noble because no drum beats for you and no crowds shout your name.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Old and young, we are all on our last cruise.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
It's a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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A friend is somebody who loves us with understanding, as well as emotion.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
I consider the success of my day based on the seeds I sow, not the harvest I reap.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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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!
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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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.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Everyone lives by selling something.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Saints are sinners who kept on going.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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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.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
When Christ came into my life, I came about like a well-handled ship.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
There is an idea abroad among moral people that they should make their neighbors good. One person I have to make good: Myself. But my duty to my neighbor is much more nearly expressed by saying that I have to make him happy if I may.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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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.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted mostly.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
When your toil has been a pleasure, you have not earned money merely, but money, health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
We can only know others by ourselves.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as achievement?
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary-looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Sir, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
It is one of the worst things of sentiment that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that what is spoken.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
The person who has stopped being thankful has fallen asleep in life.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule), no woman should marry a man who does not smoke.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
You cannot run away from weakness; you must some time fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
To love is the great amulet that makes this world a garden.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson -
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