"You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others."
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Quote collection
Robert Louis Stevenson quotes (page 15 of 23)
442 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"There is no music like a little river's . . . It takes the mind out-of-doors . . . and . . . it quiets a man down like saying his prayers."
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"Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed."
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"Friends: People who know you well, but like you anyway. The cruelest lies are often told in silence."
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"The true wisdom is to be always seasonable, and to change with a good grace in changing circumstances."
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"Let any man speak long enough, he will get believers."
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"The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work."
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"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."
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"The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out."
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"The difficulty is not to write, but to write what you mean."
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"It is not enough to be ready to go where duty calls. A man should stand around where he can hear the call!"
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"My idea of man's chief end was to enrich the world with things of beauty, and have a fairly good time myself while doing so."
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"There is but one art, to omit! Oh, if I knew how to omit I would ask no other knowledge. A man who knows how to omit would make an Iliad of a daily paper."
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"Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man because he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one."
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"To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly experimental. The essence and charm of that unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of self as well as ignorance of life."
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"The FlowersAll the names I know from nurse:Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,And the Lady Hollyhock.Fairy places, fairy things,Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,Tiny trees for tiny dames-These must all be fairy names!Tiny woods below whose boughsShady fairies weave a house;Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,Where the braver fairies climb!Fair are grown-up people's trees,But the fairest woods are these;Where, if I were not so tall,I should live for good and all"
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"Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality."
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"It is better to be a fool than to be dead."
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"Anyone can carry their burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do their work, however hard, for one day."
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"Jealousy is the most radical primeval and naked form of admiration in war paint, so to speak."
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