Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

Robert Louis
Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

Scottish Novelist, Poet, Essayist and Travel Writer, known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Author Quotes

Youth now flees on feathered foot.



Your head ain't much account, nor ever was. But you're

You're either my ship's cook-and then you were treated handsome-or Cap'n Silver, a common mutineer and pirate, and then you can go hang!

Youth is an age without courage - said the doctor; - And the problems appear to be more blacks than they are. I, though old, do not despair ever.

Youth is wholly experimental.

You may imagine how I felt when I heard this abominable old rogue addressing another in the very same words of flattery as he had used to me. I think, if I had been able, that I would have killed him through the barrel.

You may lay to that.

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man--or scarce a man yet--the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late.

You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy.

You have to let me go my own way in the darkness.

Ye are a great piper. I'm not fit to blow in the same kingdom with ye. Body of me! ye have mair music in your sporran than I have in my head; And though it still stick in my mind that I could maybe show you another of it with the cold steel, I warn you beforehand-it'll no be fair! It would go against my heart to haggle a man that can blow the pipes as you can!

Years may go by, and the wheel in the river wheel as it wheels for us, children, to-day, wheel and keep roaring and foaming forever long after all of the boys are away. Home for the Indies and home from the ocean, heroes and soldiers we all will come home; still we shall find the old mill wheel in motion, Turning and churning that river to foam. You with the bean that I gave when we quarreled, I with your marble of Saturday last, honored and old and all gaily appareled, here we shall meet and remember the past.

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.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.



You can kill the body but not the spirit.

You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else.

You cannot run away from a weakness, you must sometimes fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now and where you stand?

You could read Kant by yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with someone else.


Woodman, is your courage stout?

Author Picture
First Name
Robert Louis
Last Name
Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson
Birth Date
Death Date
