Best 464 quotes of Robert Louis Stevenson on MyQuotes

A birdie with a yellow bill Hoped upon the window sill, Cocked his shining eye and said: 'Ain't you 'shamed, you sleepy-'ead?

A bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect.

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

A child should always say what's true, And speak when he is spoken to, And behave mannerly at table: At least as far as he is able.

A friend is somebody who loves us with understanding, as well as emotion.

After all, the commonplaces are the great poetic truths.

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong.

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.

A great part of this life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.

A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.

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.

A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.

A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest blessings.

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!

A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind.

All error, not merely verbal, is a strong way of stating that the current truth is incomplete.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

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.

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth, and none, or almost none for the disenchantment of age.

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.

A man met a lad weeping. "What do you weep for?" he asked. "I am weeping for my sins," said the lad. "You must have little to do," said the man. The next day, they met again. Once more the lad was weeping. "Why do you weep now?" asked the man. "I am weeping because I have nothing to eat," said the lad. "I thought it would come to that," said the man.

Am I no a bonny fighter?

A Morning Prayer The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man; help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces, let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day. Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.

An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate.

And every day when I've been good, I get an orange after food.

and he began to understand what a wild game we play in life; he began to understand that a thing once done cannot be undone nor changed by saying "I am sorry!

And my heart springs up anew, Bright and confident and true, And the old love comes to meet me, in the dawning and the dew.

And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing. For to miss the joy is to miss all.

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.

An intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils".

Anyone can carry their burden, however hard, until nightfall. Anyone can do their work, however hard, for one day.

Anyone can carry his burden, however heavy, until nightfall. Anyone can do his work, however hard, for one day. Anyone can live sweetly, patiently, lovingly, purely, until the sun goes down. And this is all that life really means.

A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in nature, neither represents it.

As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed an narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train.

Away down the river, A hundred miles or more, Other little children Shall bring my boats ashore.

Away with funeral music-set The pipe to powerful lips- The cup of life's for him that drinks And not for him that sips.

Being happy enables you to be free from domination by the outside world.

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.

Be what you are, and become what you are capable of becoming.

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying, Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how!

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

Bright is the ring of words When the right man rings them, Fair the fall of songs When the singer sings them. Still they are carolled and said - On wings they are carried - After the singer is dead And the maker buried.

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.

But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognized by the police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realized, and some principle to guide simple folk in their selection.

But of works of art little can be said.

But that is the object of long living, that man should cease to care about life.

But we are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death. It is a honeymoon with us all through, and none of the longest. Small blame to us if we give our whole hearts to this glowing bride of ours, to the appetities, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.