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RLRobert Louis Stevenson

186 collected words

Robert Louis Stevenson

Life dates: 1850 AD — 1894 AD

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays as well as fiction. His reflections on hopeful work and ordinary kindness reward reading in context, with anthology variants kept visible.

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Life and writing

The Robert Louis Stevenson website’s timeline records his birth in Edinburgh in November 1850 and death in December 1894. It places the publication of Virginibus Puerisque in April 1881 and describes his later move to Samoa. These lifetime and publication dates orient the writer’s career; they do not date the composition of the archive’s individual excerpts. The archive retains its original undated source records rather than replacing their dates with the profile’s independently referenced lifetime.

Two historical selections lead into different essay arguments. El Dorado ends by placing hopeful effort above the imagined final satisfaction of arrival. A Christmas Sermon presents honesty, kindness, restraint and friendship as demanding ordinary responsibilities. The linked editions preserve differences from the anthology: the journey passage has hands and ye where the anthology has bands and we, while the sermon includes grim condition and all that. Reading those paragraphs in place shows their rhetorical setting without silently rewriting the archive or treating either sentence as an unconditional rule.

Reading this voice

Start with El Dorado’s last paragraph in the 1897 edition, then read XII, A Christmas Sermon, in the 1915 Across the Plains. Both selected anthology paragraphs differ from these linked texts. The journey passage changes bands/hands, we/ye and labor/labour; the sermon omits grim and that and adds to before be embittered. Existing wording and URLs stay intact. The profile does not independently authenticate the contributor-supplied quotations associated with this name, and the lifetime years are not excerpt composition dates.

Subjects to explore

hopeworkkindnesshonesty

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

09c. 1872 AD
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
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10c. 1872 AD
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
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11c. 1872 AD
I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. 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; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
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12c. 1872 AD
A writer can live by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature of the work he does all day will more affect his happiness than the quality of his dinner at night. Whatever be your calling, and however much it brings you in the year, you could still, you know, get more by cheating. We all suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about a little poverty; but such considerations should not move us in the choice of that which is to be the business and justification of so great a portion of our lives; and like the missionary, the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all choose that poor and brave career in which we can do the most and best for mankind.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
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14c. 1872 AD
Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ship's doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenter's mate; John Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce, owner's servants, landsmen--being all that is left faithful of the ship's company--with stores for ten days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew British colours on the log-house in Treasure Island. Thomas Redruth, owner's servant, landsman, shot by the mutineers; James Hawkins, cabin boy--'And at the same time, I was wondering over poor Jim Hawkins' fate.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
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18c. 1872 AD
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
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20c. 1872 AD
This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because 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.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
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