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
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
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Truth, Friendship, Candor
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
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness
Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Shopping
Like a bird singing in the rain,
let grateful memories survive
in times of sorrow.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Youth is wholly experimental.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Youth
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
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
That man is successful who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much, who has gained the respect of the intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Success & Failure, Success
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
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: Identity, Appetite, Laziness, Busy, Idleness
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Travel, Tourism, Success
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
Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors. If it may not, give us the strength to encounter that which is to come, that we be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath, and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving one to another.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Enemies, Enemy
To be honest, to be kind-to earn a little and spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation-above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself-here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Self-Discovery
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
It blows a snowing gale in the winter of the year;
The boats are on the sea and the crews are on the pier.
The needle of the vane, it is veering to and fro,
A flash of sun is on the veering of the vane.
Autumn leaves and rain,
The passion of the gale.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
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: Friends and Friendship, Friends, Friendship
There is but one art, to omit.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Authors & Writing
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Give, Gift, Friend
Absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Absence
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
Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Wine
Keep fears to yourself, share inspiration with others.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Courage
You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
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: Resolve, Perseverance, Endurance
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable, in retrospect.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Decisions, Action
The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness, World
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
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
In the harsh face of life faith can read a bracing gospel.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Faith
The obscurest epoch is to-day.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Present, The Present
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: Travel, Wilderness, Friendship
You can kill the body but not the spirit.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Spirit
Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Consequences
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Night is a dead monotonous period under a roof; but in the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Night
Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Marriage
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