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
Umbrellas, like faces, acquire a certain sympathy with the individual who carries them. May it not be said of the bearers of these inappropriate umbrellas, that they go about the streets ‘with a lie in their right hand?’ Except in a very few cases of hypocrisy joined to a powerful intellect, men, not by nature, umbrellarians, have tried again and again to become so by art, and yet have failed, have expended their patrimony in the purchase of umbrella after umbrella, and yet have systematically lost them, and have finally, with contrite spirits and shrunken purses, given up their vain struggle, and relied on theft and borrowing for the remainder of their lives.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Hypocrisy
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Preparation, Politicians, Politics
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: Men & Women, Men, Women
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: Goals, Aspirations
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
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: Laziness, Identity, Idleness, Appetite, Busy
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
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
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding; and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in the heart itself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Goals, Aspirations
When I am grown to man’s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Growth
There’s no music like a little river’s … It takes the mind out of doors … and… sir, it quiets a man down like saying his prayers.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Wilderness
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 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
We are all travelers in the wilderness of the world, and the best that we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friendship, Wilderness, Travel
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
Let first the onion flourish there,
Rose among roots, the maiden-fair,
Wine-scented and poetic soul
Of the capacious salad bowl.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Wine
O it’s I that am the captain of a tidy little ship,
Of a ship that goes a sailing on the pond;
And my ship it keeps a-turning all around and all about;
But when I’m a little older, I shall find the secret out
How to send my vessel sailing on beyond.
For I mean to grow a little as the dolly at the helm,
And the dolly I intend to come alive;
And with him beside to help me, it’s a-sailing I shall go,
It’s a-sailing on the water, when the jolly breezes blow
And the vessel goes a dive-dive-dive.
O it’s then you’ll see me sailing through the rushes and the reeds,
And you’ll hear the water singing at the prow;
For beside the dolly sailor, I’m to voyage and explore,
To land upon the island where no dolly was before,
And to fire the penny cannon in the bow.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
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: Vegetarianism, Babies
For God’s sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Time, Youth
In the harsh face of life faith can read a bracing gospel.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Faith
Some people swallow the universe like a pill; they travel on through the world, like smiling images pushed from behind.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Acceptance
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Tourism, Travel
You can kill the body but not the spirit.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Spirit
Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Achievements, Success is not everything
Everyone should always have two books with him, one to read and one to write in.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
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
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
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
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
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