Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser. It is as if a ship captain should sail to India from the Port of London; and having brought a chart of the Thames on deck at his first setting out, should obstinately use no other for the whole voyage.

I'll be as silent as the grave.

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

Yet I had not been many days shut up with them before I began to be ashamed of my first judgment, when I had drawn away from them at the Ferry pier, as though they had been unclean beasts. No class of man is altogether bad, but each has its own faults and virtues; and these shipmates of mine were no exception to the rule. Rough they were, sure enough; and bad, I suppose; but they had many virtues. They were kind when it occurred to them, simple even beyond the simplicity of a country lad like me, and had some glimmerings of honesty.

"Now, Bill, sit where you are," said the beggar. "If I can't see, I can hear a finger stirring. Business is business. Hold out your right hand. Boy, take his right hand by the wrist and bring it near my right."
We both obeyed him to the letter, and I saw him pass something from the hollow of the hand that held his stick into the palm of the captain's, which closed upon it instantly.

The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind. The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life.

I rushed to the mirror. At the sight that met my eyes, my blood was changed to something thin and icy. Yes, I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde. How was this to be explained? I asked myself; and then, with another bound of terror - how was it to be remedied?

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

We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable — not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.

In many ways an artistic nature unfits a man for practical existence.

Give us grace and strength to forbear and to persevere. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind, spare to us our friends, soften to us our enemies.

This is a handy cove, and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?

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

Let anyone speak long enough, he will get believers.