Robert Louis Stevenson

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you.

Blood built it; blood stopped the building of it; blood shall bring it down.

If the barons live at war, ploughfolk must eat roots.

Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were betrayed.

There is no greater wonder than the way the face of a young woman fits in a man’s mind, and stays there, and he could never tell you why; it just seems it was the thing he wanted.

He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify a taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years.

Here is the key to right and wrong:

You shall seek in vain upon the map of Europe for the bygone state of Grünewald.

It is a commonplace, that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have been tried. But it is not so common a reflection, and surely more consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better than we thought.

With the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare’s characters are what we call marrying men.

And as for riding down that black, atrocious miscreant, I regard it as an act of virtue, sir, like stamping on a cockroach.

Blood’s thicker than water; and there’s naebody but you and me that ought the name.

Birds are a good sentry; in forest places they be the first line of battle.

I was thinking I would be a happier man if I could ride and run the danger of my life with these lawless companions.

Patriotism is not always moral in the formal sense.

“I incline to Cain’s heresy,” he used to say quaintly: “I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.”

All night long in the dark and wet,

Less fortunate than Poland, she left not a regret behind her; and the very memory of her boundaries has faded.

It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger.

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