"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."
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Quote collection
Robert Louis Stevenson quotes (page 12 of 23)
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"To be honest...here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude..."
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"Respectability is a very good thing in its way, but it does not rise superior to all considerations. I would not for a moment venture to hint that it was a matter of taste; but I think I will go as far as this: that if a position is admittedly unkind, uncomfortable, unnecessary, and superfluously useless, although it were as respectableasthe Church of England, the sooner a man is out of it, the better for himself, and all concerned."
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"I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on the thought of the separation of these elements."
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"The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance."
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"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."
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"I incline to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way."
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"Youth is the time to go flashing from one end of the world to the other, both in mind and body."
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"The very flexibility and ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate --a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes --he may be left, in a month, destitute of all."
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"We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers-Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building-had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjuct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic-that flatterer of credulity-the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision."
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"Really don't choose every day from the harvest you experience but from the seeds you plant"
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"A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind."
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"All I dreamed about Dr. Jekyll was that one man was being pressed into a cabinet, when he swallowed a drug and changed into another being. I awoke and said at once that I had found the missing link for which I had been looking so long, and before I went again to sleep almost every detail of the story, as it stands, was clear to me. Of course, writing it was another thing."
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"Happiness, eternal or temporal, is not the reward that mankind seeks, Happinesses are but his wayside companions. His soul is in the journey and in the struggle."
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"When loud by landside streamlets gush, And clear in the greenwood quires the thrush, With sun on the meadows And songs in the shadows Comes again to me The gift of the tongues of the lea, The gift of the tongues of meadows. So when the earth is alive with gods, And the lusty ploughman breaks the sod, And the grass sings in the meadows, And the flowers smile in the shadows, Sits my heart at ease, Hearing the song of the leas, Singing the songs of the meadows."
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"Teacher, tender comrade, wife, A fellow-farer true through life."
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"Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield."
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"Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end."
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"In winter I get up at night And dress by yellow candle-light. In summer quite the other way I have to go to bed by day."
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"Lastly no woman should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for nothing that this "ignoble tobagie" as Michelet calls it, spreads all over the world."
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