Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes (177 Quotes)

I sat in the sun on a bench; the animal within me licking the chops of memory; the spiritual side a little drowsed, promising subsequent penitence, but not yet moved to begin.

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

The workpeople, to be sure, were most annoyingly slow, but time cured that.

I swear to God I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And indeed he does not want my help; you do not know him as I do; he is safe, he is quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be heard of. ~Jekyll

But what is the black spot, captain?

Then it was that there came into my head the first of the mad notions that contributed so much to saving our lives.

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

Fifteen men on the Dead Man's Chest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

This grove, that was now so peaceful, must then have rung with cries, I thought; and even with the thought I could believe I heard it ringing still.

It was for one minute that I saw him, but the hair stood upon my head like quills. Sir, if that was my master, why had he a mask upon his face?

If it comes to a swinging, swing all, say I.

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

O my poor old Harry Jekyll, if ever I read Satan's signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend.

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

We got together in a few days a company of the toughest old salts imaginable--not pretty to look at, but fellows, by their faces, of the most indomitable spirit.

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

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.

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!

The less I understood of this farrago, the less I was in a position to judge of its importance.

It was Silver's voice, and before I had heard a dozen words, I would not have shown myself for all the world. I lay there, trembling and listening, in the extreme of fear and curiostiy, for, in those dozen words, I understood that the lives of all the honest men aboard depended on me alone.

There comes an end to all things; the most capacious measure is filled at last; and this brief condescension to evil finally destroyed the balance of my soul.

Seaward ho! Hang the treasure! It's the glory of the sea that has turned my head.

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

Sir, with no intention to take offence, I deny your right to put words into my mouth.

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.

Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought, sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us, but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange as our actual adventures.

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.

With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to the truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.

The captain has said too much or he has said too little, and I'm bound to say that I require an explanation of his words.

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