Well! Marriage is like death, it comes to all.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

We may now briefly enumerate the elements of style.  We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, logic and meter—harmonious in diversity: common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture of committed phrases and of rounded periods—but this is particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and communicative words.  We begin to see now what an intricate affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete a pleasure.  From the arrangement of according letters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but has been exercised.  We need not wonder, then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. It's trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But there's no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, that's my view.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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 after ward, I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Wine is bottled poetry

— Robert Louis Stevenson

Wine is bottled poetry.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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 denunciation act against what we are pleased to call our neighbor's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.

— Robert Louis Stevenson

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

— Robert Louis Stevenson