Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer. He was best known for his classic works Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. His works are known for their adventure and exploration themes, and he is often credited with popularizing the genre of adventure fiction. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson on travel, marriage, death.
Do not measure success by today's harvest. Measure success by the seeds you plant today.
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
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.
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own.
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 inspirational quote
Robert Louis Stevenson Image Quotes
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Like a bird singing in the rain, the grateful memories survive in time of sorrow.
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much.
The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.
The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.
If he be Mr. Hyde" he had thought, "I shall be Mr. Seek.
Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About Travel
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
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. — Robert Louis Stevenson
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. — Robert Louis Stevenson
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind. — Robert Louis Stevenson
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 travel not to go anywhere, but to go. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, Nor a friend to know me; All I seek, the heaven above And the road below me. — Robert Louis Stevenson
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor. — 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
Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About Marriage
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
In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. — 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
Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes. — Robert Louis Stevenson
But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realised, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Marriage is like life - it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The essence of love is kindness. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Once you are married, there is nothing for you, not even suicide, but to be good. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About Death
Like a bird singing in the rain, let grateful memories survive in time of sorrow. — Robert Louis Stevenson
O God! I screamed, and "O God! Again and again; for there before my eyes - pale and shaken, and half fainting, and groping before him with his hands, like a man restored from death - there stood Henry Jekyll." — Robert Louis Stevenson
If this is death, it is easier than life. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Here he lies where he longed to be;Home is the sailor, home from sea,and the hunter home from the hill. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Going for character: why not now, and where you stand? — Robert Louis Stevenson
When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine. — Robert Louis Stevenson
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. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door; Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shore Where neither piping bird nor peeping dawn Disturbs the eternal sleep, But in the stillness far withdrawn Our dreamless rest for evermore we keep. — Robert Louis Stevenson
He is not dead, this friend; not dead, Gone some few, trifling steps ahead, And nearer to the end; So that you, too, once past the bend, Shall meet again, as face to face, this friend You fancy dead. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Death is given in a kiss; the dearest kindnesses are fatal; and into this life, where one thing preys upon another, the child too often makes its entrance from the mother's corpse. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About Writing
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
When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind. — Robert Louis Stevenson
There is but one art, to omit. — Robert Louis Stevenson
No human being ever spoke of scenery for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect that we hear too much of it in literature. — Robert Louis Stevenson
I would rather do a good hours work weeding than write two pages of my best; nothing is so interesting as weeding. I went crazy over the outdoor work, and at last had to confine myself to the house, or literature must have gone by the board. — Robert Louis Stevenson
I hate to write, but I love to have written. — 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
I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About Life
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The person who has stopped being thankful has fallen asleep in life. — Robert Louis Stevenson
I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it's good fun. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Anyone can carry his burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, till the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means. — 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
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life. — 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
You seem to me to be a pretty lucky young man; keep your eyes open to your mercies. That part of piety is eternal; and the man who forgets to be grateful has fallen asleep in life. — Robert Louis Stevenson
We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature. — Robert Louis Stevenson
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About World
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
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
Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail, in good spirits. — 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
The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. — Robert Louis Stevenson
If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel! — Robert Louis Stevenson
The world has no room for cowards. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Dogs live with man as courtiers 'round a monarch, steeped in the flattery of his notice ... to push their favor in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their lives. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The world is full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. — 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
Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About Friend
A friend is a present you give to yourself. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy. — 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 would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson
No man is useless while he has a friend. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Of what shall a man be proud, if he is not proud of his friends? — 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
O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend. — 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
Of what shall we be proud of if we are not proud of our friends? — Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes About Friends
Friends: People who know you well, but like you anyway.
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. — Robert Louis Stevenson
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. — Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend is somebody who loves us with understanding, as well as emotion. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The correction of silence is what kills; when you know you have transgressed, and your friend says nothing, and avoids your eye. — 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
Robert Louis Stevenson Famous Quotes And Sayings
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. — Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend is a gift you give yourself. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. — Robert Louis Stevenson
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. — Robert Louis Stevenson
I will make you brooches and toys for your delight Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night. I will make a palace fit for you and me Of green days in forests and blue days at sea. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyone lives by selling something. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences. — Robert Louis Stevenson
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding. — Robert Louis Stevenson
A generous prayer is never presented in vain; the petition may be refused, but the petitioner is always, I believe, rewarded by some gracious visitation. — Robert Louis Stevenson
That man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The saints are the sinners who keep on trying. — 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
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. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference. — 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
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
Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others. — Robert Louis Stevenson
There is nothing but God's grace. We walk upon it; we breathe it; we live and die by it; it makes the nails and axles of the universe. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Make up your mind to be happy. Learn to find pleasure in simple things. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty. — 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
Nothing like a little judicious levity. — 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
And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant. — 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
There is no duty we so much underrated as the duty of being happy. — Robert Louis Stevenson
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. — Robert Louis Stevenson
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
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. — Robert Louis Stevenson
I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both. — Robert Louis Stevenson
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. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate. — Robert Louis Stevenson
I consider the success of my day based on the seeds I sow, not the harvest I reap. — Robert Louis Stevenson
We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The rain is falling all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea. - Rain — Robert Louis Stevenson
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. — Robert Louis Stevenson
I lived on rum, I tell you. It's been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was. — Robert Louis Stevenson
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
There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul. — 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
A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of goodwill; and their entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted. — Robert Louis Stevenson
I believe in an ultimate decency of things. — Robert Louis Stevenson
To be truly happy is a question of how we begin, and not how we end, of what we want and not what we have. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer. — Robert Louis Stevenson
An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate. — Robert Louis Stevenson
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect. — Robert Louis Stevenson
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself! — Robert Louis Stevenson
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
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
Wine is bottled poetry. — Robert Louis Stevenson
To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Children are certainly too good to be true. — Robert Louis Stevenson
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series. — Robert Louis Stevenson
The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek. — Robert Louis Stevenson
You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us. — 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
Keep your eyes open to your mercies. The man who forgets to be thankful has fallen asleep in life. — 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
Every man has a sane spot somewhere. — 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. — Robert Louis Stevenson
A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect. — Robert Louis Stevenson
It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it. — 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
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits. — Robert Louis Stevenson
Life Lessons by Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson taught us that life is a journey, and that it is important to take risks and explore the unknown.
He also showed us that life is precious and should be lived to the fullest, and that we should not take our time here for granted.
His stories also remind us to be kind and generous to others, and to always strive to be the best version of ourselves.
Citation
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