Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

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!

But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.

Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.

Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.

It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation.

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.

Sanity itself is a kind of convention.

There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.

The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.

The wine is bottled poetry.

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!

Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.

And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.

When a man is in a fair way and sees all life open in front of him, he seems to himself to make a very important figure in the world. His horse whinnies to him; the trumpets blow and the girls look out of window as he rides into town before his company; he receives many assurances of trust and regard--sometimes by express in a letter--sometimes face to face, with persons of great consequence falling on his neck. It is not wonderful if his head is turned for a time. But once he is dead, were he as brave as Hercules or as wise as Solomon, he is soon forgotten.