Inspirational Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish Novelist)

Inspirational Quotations by Robert Louis Stevenson (Scottish Novelist)

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

It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Civilization

Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Appetite, Busy, Idleness, Identity, Laziness

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Like a bird singing in the rain,
let grateful memories survive
in times of sorrow.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Everyone should always have two books with him, one to read and one to write in.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

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

I never weary of great churches. It is my favorite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Religion, Churches

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

It is not much for its beauty that makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle, something, that quality of air that emanates from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

Saints are sinners who kept on going.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Endurance, Perseverance, Resolve

Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Ancestors, Ancestry

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Consequences

Once you are married, there is nothing for you, not even suicide, but to be good.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Marriage

Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Marriage, Battle

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Achievements, Success is not everything

I have resolved that from this day on, I will do all the business I can honestly, have all the fun I can reasonably, do all the good I can willingly, and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Time Management, Value of Time

The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Money

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your eyes, or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way towards a dissolution of the marriage.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

The most influential books and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction.—They repeat, rearrange, and clarify the lessons of life, disengage us from ourselves, constrain us to the acquaintance of others, and show us the web of experience, but with a single change.—That monstrous, consuming ego of ours struck out.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Fiction

To be wholly devoted to some intellectual exercise is to have succeeded in life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Intelligence

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: Deception/Lying, Lying, Truth, Lies, Silence

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

Courage is the footstool of the Virtues, upon which they stand.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Courage

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love, nor a friend to know me; all I ask, the heavens above, and the road below me.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness

All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Speech, Conversation, Listening, Writing

Quiet minds can’t be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: The Mind, Balance, Meditation, Mind, Character

For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Youth, Time

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than I. And still it’s good fun.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Life and Living

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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Summer

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Books, Reading

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable, in retrospect.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Action, Decisions

To make our idea of morality center on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Superstition

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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Dogs

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: Anxiety, Defects, Weakness, Fear

All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Youth

A friend is a gift you give yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Gift, Give, Friend

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Vanity

The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friendship, Candor, Truth