Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

The Flowers

All the names I know from nurse:
Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse,
Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock,
And the Lady Hollyhock.

Fairy places, fairy things,
Fairy woods where the wild bee wings,
Tiny trees for tiny dames — These must all be fairy names!

Tiny woods below whose boughs
Shady fairies weave a house;
Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme,
Where the braver fairies climb!

Fair are grown-up people's trees,
But the fairest woods are these;
Where, if I were not so tall,
I should live for good and all

Sooner or later we all sit down to a banquet of consequences

Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain

The pleasant Land of Counterpane.

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

Sanity itself is a kind of convention.

I have lost confidence in myself.

Already an old man, he [Samuel Johnson] ventured on his Highland tour; and his heart, bound with triple brass, did not recoil before twenty-seven individual cups of tea.

All by myself I have to go, With none to tell me what to do — All alone beside the streams And up the mountain-sides of dreams.

Man is not truly one, but truly two.

You're either my ship's cook-and then you were treated handsome-or Cap'n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!

It is one of the worst things of sentiment, that the voice grows to be more important than the words, and the speaker than that which is spoken.

Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble.

After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect.