Quotes from Robert Louis Stevenson

Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,Nor a friend to know me;All I ask, the heaven aboveAnd the road below me.

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.

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be the gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

When I am grown to man's estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true,With eyes of gold and bramble dew,Steel-true and blade-straightThe great artificerMade my mate.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

Wine is bottled poetry.

It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser.

Marriage: A friendship recognized by the police.

There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it, they are wrong. I do not say give them up, for they may be all you have, but conceal them like a vice lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

Bright is the ring of wordsWhen the right man rings them.

An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.

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!

Do you know what the Governor of South Carolina said to the Governor of North Carolina? It's a long time between drinks, observed that powerful thinker.

We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.

Be it granted me to behold you again in dying,Hills of home!

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

The strangest things are there for me,Both things to eat and things to see,And many frightening sights abroadTill morning in the land of Nod.

If a man love the labour of any trade apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.