Robert Louis Stevenson quotes - page 3

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
Am I no a bonny fighter. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer made my mate. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
Let first the onion flourish there, Rose among the roots, the maiden-fair Wine scented and poetic soul of the capacious salad bowl. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality; they are the perfect duties. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories. View quote
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. View quote
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)
Youth is wholly experimental. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
Every man is his own doctor of divinity, in the last resort. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
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. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
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. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be a gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart: She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple-tart. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
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. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson
I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way. View quote
Robert Louis Stevenson