Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (1850–94) was a Scottish adventurer and author of novels, short stories, essays, and travel literature. He is best known for his novels Treasure Island (1883,) Kidnapped (1886,) and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886.) and his collection of poetry A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885.)
Stevenson suffered from lung disease from a very early age. When he couldn’t sleep at night, his nurse stayed up with him and told him stories of ghosts, monsters, and pirates. He studied law but never practiced it. Instead, he traveled and wrote books about his experiences.
One rainy summer afternoon, Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to amuse his stepson. This and the pirate stories he frequently told his stepson inspired the idea for his first great adventure novel, Treasure Island (1883.) Subsequently, he wrote Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) in just three days. Those two novels made Stevenson rich and famous.
For the rest of his life, Stevenson traveled continuously in search of a suitable climate to improve his health. He suffered from ill-health all through adulthood and did much of his writing from his sickbed. Stevenson and his wife tried living in Switzerland, Scotland, France, England, and America. They eventually settled in Apia, the capital of Samoa, where the locals christened him “Tusitala” (“Teller of Tales.”)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Robert Louis Stevenson
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
The best things in life are nearest: Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life’s plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things in life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Power, Blessings, Happiness, Work, Simplicity, Gratitude
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Aspirations, Goals
Like a bird singing in the rain,
let grateful memories survive
in times of sorrow.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Don’t write merely to be understood. Write so that you cannot possibly be misunderstood.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Writing, Understanding
The problem of education is two fold: first to know, and then to utter. Everyone who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Education
Money alone is only a mean; it presupposes a man to use it. The rich man can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere. He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither patience to read nor intelligence to see…. The purse may be full and the heart empty. He may have gained the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him … he may live as blank a life as any tattered ditcher.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Money
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Success, Success & Failure, Ability, Aspirations, Motivation, Life, Goals
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: The Present, Present, Persistence
A friend is a present you give to yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable, in retrospect.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Action, Decisions
A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Life
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Change
That man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Success, Success & Failure
Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however well we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Change
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Silence, Honesty, Truth
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Business
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Prayer
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
You cannot run away from a weakness. You must sometimes fight it out or perish; and if that be so, why not now, and where you stand?
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Weakness, Anxiety, Fear
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Money
To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Intelligence
A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career, only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Mistakes, Failures
If a man loves the labor of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Work, Ideas
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Conversation, Listening, Speech, Writing
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Communication
Everyone should always have two books with him, one to read and one to write in.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Shopping
When we look into the long avenue of the future, and see the good there is for each one of us to do, we realize, after all, what a beautiful thing it is to work, and to live, and to be happy.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be the gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness, Self-Discovery
It is a golden maxim to cultivate the garden for the nose, and the eyes will take care of themselves.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Gardens, Gardening
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Marriage
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
The existence of a man is so small a thing to take, so mighty a thing to employ.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Existence
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Silence, Deception/Lying, Lies, Truth
Our business in this world is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Failure, Business
Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to another.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Beliefs
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Walter Scott Scottish Novelist
J. M. Barrie Scottish Novelist
Arthur Conan Doyle Scottish Writer
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir Scottish Novelist
George MacDonald Scottish Poet, Novelist
Tobias Smollett Scottish Poet
Robert Burns Scottish Poet, Songwriter
David Livingstone Scottish Missionary, Explorer
Hugh Blair Scottish Minister, Scholar
Samuel Rutherford Scottish Presbyterian Theologian