Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

You think those dogs will not be in heaven! I tell you they will be there long before any of us.

Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

Old is the tree and the fruit good,Very old and thick the wood.Woodman, is your courage stout?Beware! the root is wrapped aboutYour mothers heart, your fathers bones;And like the mandrake comes with groans.

There is a romance about all those who are abroad in the black hours.

I believe you to be strictly honorable.He thoughtfully emptied his cup. I wish I could add you were intelligent, he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles.

I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener;

Captain, said the squire, the house is quite invisible from the ship. It must be the flag they are aiming at. Would it not be wiser to take it in?Strike my colours! cried the captain, No sir, not I...

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye; lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.

You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it, said I. I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man--or scarce a man yet--the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. Its the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late.

My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.

To cast in my lot with Jekyll, was to die to those appetites which I had long secretly indulged and had of late begun to pamper. To cast it in with Hyde, was to die to a thousand interests and aspirations, and to become, at a blow and forever, despised and friendless. The bargain might appear unequal; but there was still another consideration in the scales; for while Jekyll would suffer smartingly in the fires of abstinence, Hyde would be not even conscious of all that he had lost. Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.

Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard.

The rain is falling all around,It falls on field and tree,It rains on the umbrellas here,And on the ships at sea.

It is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a flying enemy

No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.

Doctors is all swabs.