Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

The HISPANIOLA still lay where she had anchored; but, sure enough, there was the Jolly Roger--the black flag of piracy--flying from her peak.

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

Don't you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?

And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.

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

Give us the strength to encounter that which is to come that we may be brave in peril constant in tribulation temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death loyal and loving one to anther.

He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration.

The Saints are the Sinners who keep on trying.

The essence of love is kindness.

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

To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times,And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.

She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.

We must go on, because we can't turn back.

Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard.

But besides that I was of an unforgiving disposition from my birth, slow to take offense, slower to forget it, and now incensed both against my companion and myself.

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.

By the time a man gets well into his seventies his continued existence is a mere miracle.

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

Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity,

There is but one art to omit.

For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.

Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?

Alan," cried I, "what makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow?"Deed, and I don't, know" said Alan. "For just precisely what I thought I liked about ye, was that ye never quarrelled:—and now I like ye better!