Robert Louis Stevenson

“Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. Glad did I live and gladly die, And I laid me down with a will.”

“He was in that humour when a man will cut off his nose to spite his face”

“It is a good thing to make a bridge of gold to a flying enemy”

“Let any one speak long enough, he will get believers.”

“in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.”

“The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.”

“It was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the mysterious events that rid us at last of the captain, though not, as you will see, of his affairs. It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard frosts and heavy gales; and it was plain from the first that my poor father was little likely to see the spring. He sank daily, and my mother and I had all the inn upon our hands, and were kept busy enough without paying much regard to our unpleasant guest.”

“Partly from the damping influence of this alarm, partly to rest Silver and the sick folk, the whole party sat down as soon as they had gained the brow of the ascent.”

“It was high time, for I now began to be tortured with thirst. The glow of the sun from above, its thousandfold reflection from the waves, the sea-water that fell and dried upon me, caking my very lips with salt, combined to make my throat burn and my brain ache.”

“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!”

“Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.”

“There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else.”

“I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens. I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the moral side, and in my own person, that 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; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on thethought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable;the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated?”

“This is a handy cove, and a pleasant sittyated grog-shop. Much company, mate?”

“If you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”

“Doctors is all swabs.”

“Scotland has no unity except on the map”

“La giovinezza è un’età senza coraggio — replicò il dottore; — e i problemi appaiono più neri di quel che sono. Io, benché vecchio, non dispero mai.”

“A una donna che ama, all’inizio piace essere obbedita, sebbene trovi poi la sua gioia nell’obbedire. Fate come vi chiedo, per amor del Cielo, o non risponderò di niente.”

“Quando una donna ha dimenticato una volta il suo amor proprio compiendo il primo passo, ha lasciato da molto tempo dietro le spalle ogni considerazione infantile di orgoglio.”

“In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.”

“And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he had remembered something."The score!" he burst out. "Three goes o' rum! Why, shiver my timbers, if I hadn't forgotten my score!"And, falling on a bench, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining; and we laughed together, peal after peal, until the tavern rang again.”

“I love this quote uttered by the character Widget in The Night Circus. He credits it to Herr Thiessen but knows it is a literary quote by the another author."Wine is bottled poetry”

“...the narrow arched entries that continually vomited passengers.”

“A good conscience is eight parts of courage.”

“Ah, said Silver, it were fortunate for me that I had Hawkins here. You would have let old john be cut to bits, and never given it a thought, doctor.'Not a thought,' replied Dr. Livesey cheerily.”

“I had learned to dwell with pleasure as a beloved daydream on the thought of the separation of these elements. If each I told myself could be housed in separate identities life would be relieved of all that was unbearable the unjust might go his way delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path doing the good things in which he found his pleasure and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil.”

“To cast in it with Hyde was to die a thousand interests and aspirations.”

“It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound togetherthat in the agonised womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How then were they dissociated”

“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.”

“The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.”

“An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.”

“For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.”

“Do you know Poole," he said, looking up, "that you and I are about to place ourselves in a position of some peril?”

“A true writer is someone the gods have called to the task.”

“To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.”

“Compromise is the best and cheapest lawyer”

“There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.”

“Make the most of the best and the least of the worst.”

“In the immediate nearness of the gold, all else had been forgotten [...], and I could not doubt that he hoped to seize upon the treasure, find and board the Hispanola under cover of night, cut every honest throat about that island, and sail away as he had at first intended, laden with crimes and riches.”

“What am I to call it? Diffidence? The fear of ridicule? Inverted vanity? What matters names, if it has brought me to this? I could never bear to be bustling about nothing; I was ashamed of this toy kingdom from the first; I could not tolerate that people should fancy I believed in a thing so patently absurd! I would do nothing that cannot be done smiling. I have a sense of humour, forsooth! I must know better than my Maker. And it was the same thing in my marriage," he added more hoarsely. "I did not believe this girl could care for me; I must not intrude; I must preserve the foppery of my indifference. What an impotent picture!""Ay, we have the same blood," moralised Gotthold. "You are drawing, with fine strokes, the character of the born sceptic.""Sceptic?—coward!" cried Otto. "Coward is the word. A springless, putty-hearted, cowering coward!”

“Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?”

“When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.”

“In winter I get up at night,and dress by yellow candlelight,In summer, quite the other day,I have to go to bed by day”

“But, mate, my heart is sore for Christian diet. You mightn't happen to have a piece of cheese about you, now? No? Well, many's the long night I've dreamed of cheese--toasted, mostly--and woke up again, and here I were.”

“The veil of self-indulgence was rent from head to foot. I saw my life as a whole.”

“His past was fairly blameless; few men could read the rolls of their life with less apprehension; yet he was humbled to the dust by the many ill things he had done, and raised up again into sober and fearful gratitude by the many he had come so near to doing, yet avoided.”

“But he had an approved tolerance for others; sometimes wondering, almost with envy, at the high pressure of spirits involved in their misdeeds; and in any extremity inclined to help rather than to reprove. 'I incline to Cain's heresy,' he used to say quaintly: 'I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

“Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.”

“The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.”