Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes 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

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Literature, Difficulty, Writing

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Travel, Tourism

Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom, Proverbs

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

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Shopping

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Success, Travel, Tourism

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

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, Weakness, Fear, Defects

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

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

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: Gratitude, Happiness, Work, Power, Blessings, Simplicity

Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Humanity, Humankind

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

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

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

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying “Amen” to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to keep your soul alive.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Self-Discovery, Desires, Desire, Confidence, Being Ourselves, Self-reliance

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 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

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

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

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Death, Nature

Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
and the hunter home from the hill.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Death

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

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

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

Youth is wholly experimental.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Youth

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

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Marriage, Husbands

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

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 appetites, 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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