Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

The cruelest lies are often told in silence.

At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion.

In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbours vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.

We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. Its trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But theres no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, thats my view.

... I deny your right to put words into my mouth.

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 after ward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honour. It is human at least, if not divine.

To My MotherYou too, my mother, read my rhymesFor love of unforgotten times,And you may chance to hear once moreThe little feet along the floor.

It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity.

The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.

he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past.

...with a strong strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

He felt ready to face the devil, and strutted in the ballroom with the swagger of a cavalier.

Dont you know Poole, you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?

To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.

Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.

Suicide carried off many. Drink and the devil took care of the rest