Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

It is one thing to mortify curiosity, another to conquer it.

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

I learned to recognise the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both.

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.

The saints are the sinners who keep on trying.

Sir, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

Wine is bottled poetry.

There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.

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.

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.