Robert Louis Stevenson

Writer

1850-11-13

Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

• Extreme busyness is a symptom of deficient vitality, and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

  Read quote

• Wine is bottled poetry

  Read quote

• A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

  Read quote

• Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.

  Read quote

• We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and metre— harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods— but this particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

  Read quote

• Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses.  Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

  Read quote

• ... Man is not truly one, but truly two... even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both...

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.

  Read quote

• Well! marriage is like death, it comes to all.

  Read quote

• Three,' reckoned the captain, 'ourselves make seven, counting Hawkins, here. Now, about honest hands?'Most likely Trelawney's own men, said the doctor; 'those he had picked up for himself, before he lit on Silver.'Nay,' replied the squire. 'Hands was one of mine.'I did think I could have trusted Hands,' added the captain.

  Read quote

• And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he had remembered something.The score! he burst out. Three goes o' rum! Why, shiver my timbers, if I hadn't forgotten my score!And, falling on a bench, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining; and we laughed together, peal after peal, until the tavern rang again.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• 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!

  Read quote

• To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.

  Read quote

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

  Read quote

• Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

  Read quote

• Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.

  Read quote