Robert Louis Stevenson, fully Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson

Wherever we are, it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else, and whatever we do, however we'll we do it, it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.

Whether they want to or not, I was henceforth confined to the better part of my life. How much I enjoyed this thought!

While flowing fast away, leaves love behind.

While here at home, in shining day, we round the sunny garden play, each little Indian sleepy-head is being kissed and put to bed.

Who comes tonight? We ope the doors in vain.

Who's the best shot? asked the captain. Mr. Trelawney, out and away, said I. Mr. Trelawney, will you please pick me off one of these men, sir? [Israel] Hands, if possible.

Wild horses wouldn't draw it from you?

Wine is bottled poetry.

When a woman has forgotten once his pride taking the first step, he left a long time looking over your shoulder every consideration childish pride.

With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbor's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.

When an old gentlemen waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when I was your age," it is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: "My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And yet the one is as good as the other.

With a strong strong glow of courage, drank off the potion.

When I am grown to man s estate I shall be very proud and great. And tell the other girls and boys Not to meddle with my toys.

When I suffer in mind, stories are my refuge; I take them like opium; and consider one who writes them as a sort of doctor of the mind.

When it comes to my own turn to lay my weapons down, I shall do so with thankfulness and fatigue, and whatever be my destiny afterward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

When the teeth are shut the tongue is at home.

When we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side. . . . O toiling hands of mortals! O wearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

Whenever the moon and stars are set, whenever the wind is high, all night long in the dark and wet, a man goes riding by. Late in the night when the fires are out, why does he gallop and gallop about?

What are you able to build with your blocks? Castles and palaces, temples and docks. Rain may keep raining, and others go roam, but I can be happy and building at home.

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

What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps a-field.

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

What a horror insurgent was bound to him more than one wife, it was the most intimate of an eye; that was lying locked up in his flesh, where he heard howling and struggling to come to light; and that in moments of weakness when he abandoned himself to sleep and the dominated and excluded from life.

What a number of things a river does, by simply following Gravity in the innocence of its heart!

What a supper I had of it that night, with all my friends around me; and what a meal it was, with Ben Gunn's salted goat and some delicacies and a bottle of old wine from the HISPANIOLA. Never, I am sure, were people gayer or happier. And there was Silver, sitting back almost out of the firelight, but eating heartily, prompt to spring forward when anything was wanted, even joining quietly in our laughter--the same bland, polite, obsequious seaman of the voyage out.