Robert Louis Stevenson – 50 Quotes

50 Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

Wine is bottled poetry.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

– 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

Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.

– 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.

– 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

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

– 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

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

When I am grown to man’s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

– 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

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

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

So long as we love, we serve 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

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

Talk is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money, it is all profit, it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.

– 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

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.

– Robert Louis Stevenson