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 world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: World, Happiness
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 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
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Morals, Honesty, Morality
You can kill the body but not the spirit.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Spirit
The cruelest lies are often told in silence. A man may have sat in a room for hours and not opened his mouth, and yet come out of that room a disloyal friend or a vile calumniator.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Lies, Deception/Lying, Silence, Truth, Lying
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Reading, Books
In this business it takes time to be really good – and by that time, you’re obsolete.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Business
Marriage is one long conversation, checkered by disputes.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Marriage
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
There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Fun, Life
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Candor, Friendship, Truth
To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Ability, Goals, Aspirations, Appropriateness, Success, Success & Failure, Being True to Yourself, Aptness, Life, Motivation
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness, Duty
Youth is wholly experimental.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Youth
In the harsh face of life faith can read a bracing gospel.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Faith
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, The Mind, Character, Meditation
We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Happiness
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
Marriage is like life – it is a field of battle, not a bed of roses.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Marriage, Battle
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, Friends and Friendship
Every man has a sane spot somewhere.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
Like a bird singing in the rain,
let grateful memories survive
in times of sorrow.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Ancestry, Ancestors
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
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Opportunity, Getting Going, Failures, Procrastination, Inaction, Mistakes, Risk
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Tourism, Travel
If a man loves the labor of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Topics: Work, Labor, Ideas
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