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
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: Churches, Religion
The little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Women, Men, Men & Women
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
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: Career, Mistakes, Failures
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 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
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, Aptness, Success & Failure, Ability, Being True to Yourself, Life, Appropriateness, Motivation, Goals, Aspirations
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
The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Sin, Persistence
All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Conversation, Speech, Listening, Writing
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
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Truth, Candor, Friendship
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
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: Mind, Balance, Character, Meditation, The Mind
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friend, Gift, Give
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
The price we have to pay for money is sometimes liberty.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Money
The world has no room for cowards. We must all be ready somehow to toil, to suffer, to die. And yours is not the less noble because no drum beats before you when you go out into your daily battlefields, and no crowds shout about your coming when you return from your daily victory or defeat.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
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
So long as we are loved by others I should say that we are almost indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship, Friends
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
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Absence
Even I, who had the tide going out and in before me in the bay, and even watched for the ebbs, the better to get my shellfish—even I (I say) if I had sat down to think, instead of raging at my fate, must have soon guessed the secret, and got free. It was no wonder the fishers had not understood me. The wonder was rather that they had ever guessed my pitiful illusion, and taken the trouble to come back. I had starved with cold and hunger on that island for close upon one hundred hours. But for the fishers, I might have left my bones there, in pure folly. And even as it was, I had paid for it pretty dear, not only in past sufferings, but in my present case; being clothed like a beggar-man, scarce able to walk, and in great pain of my sore throat.
I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Adversity
Nothing more strongly arouses our disgust than cannibalism, yet we make the same impression on Buddhists and vegetarians, for we feed on babies, though not our own
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Babies, Vegetarianism
A man should stop his ears against paralyzing terror and run the race that is set before him with a single mind.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend is a present you give to yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friendship, Friends and Friendship
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.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Death
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