816 Quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson

... and for the first time began to understand the desperate game that we play in life; and how a thing once done is not to be changed or remedied, by any penitence.

WHOLE DUTY OF CHILDREN: A child should always say what's true and speak when he is spoken to, and behave mannerly at table; at least as far as he is able.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean.

Old is the tree and the fruit good,Very old and thick the wood.Woodman, is your courage stout?Beware! the root is wrapped aboutYour mother's heart, your father's bones;And like the mandrake comes with groans.

Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past.

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasure. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty.

Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to print a Shakespeare on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with nonsense.

Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognized in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself.