Robert Louis Stevenson

"For thirty years," he said, "I’ve sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as …

Them that die will be the lucky ones!

Many's a long night I've dreamed of cheese — toasted mostly.

We must go on, because we can't turn back.

You can't touch pitch and not be mucked, lad.

Pieces of eight, pieces of eight, pieces of eight!

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener.

"What is the Black Spot, Captain?" "That's a summons, mate."

Doctors is all swabs... and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes — what do the …

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!

But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.

Though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.

Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.

It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation.

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.

Sanity itself is a kind of convention.

There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear.

This is still the strangest thing in all man's travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.

The old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidelities.

The wine is bottled poetry.

If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of good wine, like a …

Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.

And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.

When things fall out opportunely for the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary …