Robert Louis Stevenson Quotations | Page 4

One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal Green - one more, and my bosom Feels new life with an ecstasy.

I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and I find it hard to believe.

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;

A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.

I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?

Fiction is to grown men what play is to the child.

When we look in to the long avenue of the future, and see the good there is for each one of us to do, we realize, after all, what a beautiful thing it is to work, and to live, and to be happy.

There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper.

Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said - On wings they are carried - After the singer is dead And the maker buried.

Cruel children, crying babies, All grow up as geese and gabies, Hated, as their age increases, By their nephews and their nieces.

Strange indeed is the attraction of the forest for the minds of men.

Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body.

O wind, a-blowing all day long, O wind, that sings so loud a song!

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me.

To have suffered ... sets a keen edge on what remains of the agreeable. This is a great truth and has to be learned in the fire.

There can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be affable, gay, ready, clear, and welcome.

If a man lives to any considerable age, it can not be denied that he laments his imprudences, but I notice he often laments his youth a deal more bitterly and with a more genuine intonation.

Everyday life is a stimulating mixture of order and haphazardry. The sun rises and sets on schedule but the wind bloweth where it listeth.

If you want a person's faults, go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know.

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.

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.

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing.

You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese-toasted, mostly-and woke up again, and here I were.

...those little people, my brownies, who do one half of my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do for myself.

Nothing like a little judicious levity.

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.

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.

Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honorable defeat to be a form of victory.

Doubtless the world is quite right in a million ways; but you have to be kicked about a little to convince you of the fact.

The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer made my mate.

The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense.

Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort.

The only noble thing a man can do with money is to build a schooner.

Be what you are, and become what you are capable of becoming.

A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind.

Jealousy is the most radical primeval and naked form of admiration in war paint, so to speak.

Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.

I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.

I am painfully situated, Utterson; my position is a very strange - a very strange one. It is one of those affairs that cannot be mended by talking.

There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.

I believe in an ultimate decency of things.

A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.

Some places speak distinctly. Certain dark gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwreck.

A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest blessings.

To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first requisite and money but the second. To be of a quick and healthy blood, to share in all honorable curiosities, to be rich in admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession in absence or unkindness-these are the gifts of fortune which money cannot buy, and without which money can buy nothing.

It is better to be a fool than to be dead.

His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.

Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I lay me down with a will. This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be: Home is the sailor, home from the sea, And the hunter home from the hill.

Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tobagie" as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world.

The world was made before English language, and seemingly upon a different design.

It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is... to live forever.

It is not for nothing, either, that the umbrella has become the very foremost badge of modern civilization--the Urim and Thummim of respectability. . . . So strongly do we feel on this point, indeed, that we are almost inclined to consider all who possess really well-conditioned umbrellas as worthy of the Franchise.

Ice and iron cannot be welded.

Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail.

Once I guessed right, And I got credit by't; Thrice I guessed wrong, And I kept my credit on.

The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget.

We do not go to cowards for tender dealing; there is nothing so cruel as panic; the man who has least fear for his own carcase, has most time to consider others.

Youth is wholly experimental.

A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.

The true success is to labour.

The sticks break, the stones crumble, The eternal altars tilt and tumble, Sanctions and tales dislimn like mist About the amazed evangelist. He stands unshook from age to youth Upon one pin-point of the truth.

When the teeth are shut the tongue is at home.

If you wish the pick of men and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife

It is a mere illusion that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse.

If this is death, it is easier than life.

For the forest takes away from you all excuse to die. There is nothing here to cabin or thwart your free desires. Here all impudences of the brawling world reach you no more.

You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.

Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest

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.

Although I express myself with some degree of pleasantry, the purport of my words is entirely serious.

Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

We can only know others by ourselves.

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

Wine is bottled poetry.

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.

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.

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.

Every child can remember laying his head in the grass, staring into the infinitesimal forest and seeing it grow populous with fairy armies.

To forget oneself is to be happy.

Everyone lives by selling something.

He who sows hurry reaps indigestion.

Sit loosely in the saddle.

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

Saints are sinners who kept on going.

A friend is somebody who loves us with understanding, as well as emotion.

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.

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!

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.

A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.

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?

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.

When Christ came into my life, I came about like a well-handled ship.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

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.

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as achievement?

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!

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!