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

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

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

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: Nature, Death

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Self-Discovery, The Body

The existence of a man is so small a thing to take, so mighty a thing to employ.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Existence

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

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

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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 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

The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Persistence, Sin

A great part of life consists in contemplating what we cannot cure.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Life

In this business it takes time to be really good – and by that time, you’re obsolete.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Business

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

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

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

The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties. Help us to play the man, help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces; let cheerfulness abound with industry. Give us to go blithely on our business all this day, bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonored, and grant us in the end the gift of sleep.
—Robert Louis Stevenson

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

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

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

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

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

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: Present, Persistence, The Present

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, Being Ourselves, Confidence, Self-reliance, Desires, Desire

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 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

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

A friend is a present you give to yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Friends and Friendship, Friendship

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

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