Quotes by Stevenson, Robert Louis




Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (November 13 1850 - December 3 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov and others. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their narrow definition of literature. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon..

"To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on success
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"Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on books - reading
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"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things."

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"To make our idea of morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on taboos    Share

"He travels best that knows when to return. Middleton For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on travel
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"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on travel
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"It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive."

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"To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor."

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"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 civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on travel
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"The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on truth    Share

"Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catch words."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on vocabulary    Share

"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?"

Stevenson, Robert Louis on weakness
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"The world is full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on world    Share

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

Stevenson, Robert Louis on youth
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"The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on action
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"Judge each day not by the harvest you reap but by the seeds you plant."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on action
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"It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on action
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"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."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on churches    Share

"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."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on communication
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"There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on company
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"You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on company    Share

"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."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on compatibility    Share

"Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on consequences    Share

"Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences."

Stevenson, Robert Louis on consequences    Share

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. "

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"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. "

Stevenson, Robert Louis on uncategorised
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"Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it. "

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"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. "

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