Robert Louis Stevenson

“To forget oneself is to be happy.”

“Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof. I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:”

“One more step, Mr. Hands," said I, "and I'll blow your brains out! Dead men don't bite, you know," I added with a chuckle.”

“Saints are sinners who kept on going.”

“What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps a-field.”

“Into no other city does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far-away trees upon your walk; and the place is full of theatre tricks in the way of scenery.  You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of a grimy tenement in a lane:—and behold! you are face-to-face with distant and bright prospects.  You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the Highland hills.  You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic.”

“The last I think; for, O poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.”

“Zła cząstka natury, wyzwolona obecnie i sprawująca władzę była cieleśnie słabsza i gorzej rozwinięta niż dobra, którą odtrąciłem. Zarazem jednak mniej utrudziła się i wyczerpała, gdyż dotychczas dziewięć dziesiątych życia poświęcałem przecież pracy, cnocie i świadomemu, poddanemu rygorom obowiązku działaniu. Dlatego właśnie Edward Hyde był znacznie niższy, szczuplejszy i młodszy niż Henryk Jekyll. Jedną twarz rozjaśniał blask wewnętrznego światła, na drugiej mroki zła wyryły głębokie piętno. Ponadto zło (mimo wszystko słabsze w człowieku niż dobro) zniekształciło i jak gdyby okaleczyło całą postać swojego wcielenia.”

“(...) brzemię życia musi przytłaczać ludzkie barki, kiedy zaś człowiek próbuje je zrzucić, brzemię powraca w innej, obcej formie i powoduje udrękę nie do zniesienia.”

“Przekleństwo ludzkości polega więc na tym, że dwie sprzeczne natury są ze sobą na wieki złączone; że w otchłani dręczonego sumienia muszą toczyć tragiczne, niekończące się boje.”

“Chociaż niewątpliwie dwulicowy, nie byłem obłudnikiem. Obie moje połowy postępowały najzupełniej szczerze. Byłem sobą, gdy zerwawszy tamy, nurzałem się w brudzie. Ale byłem też sobą, gdy w jasnym świetle dnia pracowałem nad postępami nauki lub niosłem ulgę cierpieniom i nędzy.”

“Jestem człowiekiem, który straszliwie zgrzeszył, ale też odkupił swą winę nie mniej straszliwym cierpieniem.”

“Musisz pozwolić mi odejść w ciemność własną drogą.”

“That was Flint's treasure that we had come so far to seek, and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the ammassing, what blood and sorrow, what good ships scuttled on the deep, what brave men walking the plank blindfold, what shot of cannon, what shame and lies and cruelty, perhaps no man alive could tell.”

“It was a master surgeon, him that ampytated me - out of college and all - Latin by the bucket, and what not; but he was hanged like a dog, and sun-dried like the rest, at Corso Castle.”

“As I looked there came, I thought a change - he seemed to swell - his face became suddenly black and the features seemed to melt and alter...”

“Scared by the thought , brooded awhile on his own past, groping in all the corners of memory, lest by chance some jack-in-the-box of an old iniquity, should leap to light there.”

“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.”

“Kara nadciąga pede claudo*, lata po tym jak umarła pamięć o winie, a miłość własna dokonała przebaczenia.*pede claudo (łac.) - cichym krokiem”

“Staram się unikać zadawania pytań, które zbyt mocno przywodzą na myśl dzień sądu ostatecznego. Pytanie jest jak kamień wywołujący lawinę. Siedzisz spokojnie na szczycie wzgórza, a kamień spada w dół, poruszając inne, i wreszcie jakiś niepozorny dziadyga, o którym nawet przez moment nie myślałeś, dostaje w łeb w swoim ogródku za domem, i cała szanowana dotąd rodzina musi szybko zmieniać nazwisko. O nie, mój drogi, stworzyłem własne prawo: im niezwyklejsza wydaje się sprawa, tym mniej o nią pytam.”

“For my part, i travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move”

“No fue difícil de convertirse en Mr Hyde pero eso fue difícil de convertirse en Dr Jekyll otra vez. El bien y la maldad luchaban en mi cuerpo humano. Tuve que tomar una decisión.”

“The day returns and brings us the petty round of irritating concerns and duties.Help us to play the man,Help us to perform them with laughter and kind faces,Let cheerfulness abound with industry.Give us to go blithely on our business all this day,Bring us to our resting beds weary and content and undishonoured,And grant us in the end the gift of sleep.”

“All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”

“I have been made to learn that the doom and burden of our life is bound forever on man’s shoulders; and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.”

“Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank You for this place in which we dwell, for the love accorded us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors; if it may not, give us strength to endure that which is to come that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another. We beseech of you this help and mercy for Christ's sake.”

“Everyone who got where he is has had to begin where he was.”

“but that in case of Dr. Jekyll's "disappearance or unexplained absence for any period exceeding three calendar months," the said Edward Hyde should step into the said Henry Jekyll's shoes without further delay and free from any burthen or obligation beyond the payment of a few small sums to the members of the doctor's household”

“Half an hour from now, when I shall again and for ever reindue that hated personality, I know how I shall sit shuddering and weeping in my chair, or continue, with the most strained and fear-struck ecstasy of listening, to pace up and down this room (my last earthly refuge) and give ear to every sound of menace. Will Hyde die upon the scaffold? or will he find the courage to release himself at the last moment? God knows; I am careless; this is my true hour of death, and what is to follow concerns another than myself. Here, then, as I lay down the pen, and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end.”

“A moment before I had been safe of all men's respect, wealthy, beloved - the cloth laying for me in the dining room at home; and now I was the common quarry of mankind, hunted, houseless, a known murderer, thrall to the gallows.”

“His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories they were--about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea, and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main. By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a "true sea-dog" and a "real old salt" and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea.”

“I began to perceive more deeply than it has ever yet been stated, the trembling immateriality, the mistlike transience, of this seemingly so solid body in which we walk attired.”

“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.”

“Jekyll had more than a father's interest; Hyde had more than a son's indifference.”

“Some day...after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.”

“You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others...”

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

“-I am not sure whether he's sane.-If there's any doubt about the matter, he is.”

“After all, I reflected, I was like my neighbours; and then I smiled, comparing myself with other men, comparing my active goodwill with the lazy cruelty of their neglect.”

“Love- what is love?A great and aching heart;Wrung hands;and silence;and a long despair”

“To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: -surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.”

“With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.”

“But the truth of his teaching would seem to be this: in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to accept and to pardon all; it is our cheek we are to turn, our coat that we are to give away to the man who has taken our cloak. But when another's face is buffeted, perhaps a little of the lion will become us best. That we are to suffer others to be injured, and stand by, is not conceivable and surely not desirable.”

“In his own life, then, a man is not to expect happiness, only to profit by it gladly when it shall arise; he is on duty here; he knows not how or why, and does not need to know; he knows not for what hire, and must not ask. Somehow or other, though he does not know what goodness is, he must try to be good; somehow or other, though he cannot tell what will do it, he must try to give happiness to others.”

“Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us.”

“Noble disappointment, noble self-denial are not to be admired, not even to be pardoned, if they bring bitterness. It is one thing to enter the kingdom of heaven maim; another to maim yourself and stay without.”

“To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.”

“It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life's endeavor springs in some degree from dulness. We require higher tasks, because we do not recognise the height of those we have.”

“A hanging in a good quarrel is an easy death they say, though I could never hear of any that came back to say so.”

“What are you able to build with your blocks?Castles and palaces, temples and docks.Rain may keep raining, and others go roam,But I can be happy and building at home.”