Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.

The bourgeoisie’s weapon is starvation. If as a writer or artist you run counter to their narrow notions they simply and silently withdraw your means of subsistence. I sometimes wonder how many people of talent are executed in this way every year.

It seemed unprovoked, a wilful convulsion of brute nature…

I saw rain falling and the rainbow drawn On Lammermuir. Hearkening I heard again In my precipitous city beaten bells Winnow the keen sea wind. And here afar, Intent on my own race and place, I wrote.

And all that I could think of, in the darkness and the cold, Was just that I was leaving home and my folks were growing old.

Be it granted to me to behold you again in dying, Hills of home! and to hear again the call; Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peeweets crying, And hear no more at all.

Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying, Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how!

Trusty, dusky, vivid, true, With eyes of gold and bramble-dew, Steel-true and blade-straight, The great artificer Made my mate.

In the highlands, in the country places, Where the old plain men have rosy faces, And the young fair maidens Quiet eyes.

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

Give to me the life I love, Let the lave go by me, Give the jolly heaven above And the byway nigh me. Bed in the bush with the stars to see, Bread I dip in the river – There’s the life for a man like me, There’s the life for ever.

Life is not all Beer and Skittles. The inherent tragedy of things works itself out from white to black and blacker, and the poor things of a day look ruefully on. Does it shake my cast-iron faith? I cannot say it does. I believe in an ultimate decency of things: ay, and if I woke in hell, should still believe it!

Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: – surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.

Every one lives by selling something, whatever be his right to it.

I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.

Even though his tongue acquire the Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scots accent of the mind.