Robert Louis Stevenson

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

Wine is bottled poetry

A good conscience is eight parts of courage.

Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.

Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and pauses._ Communication may be made in broken words, the business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but that is not what we call literature; and the true business of the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning, involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear itself.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE

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 metre__armonious 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__ut this 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

So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.

Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?

... Man is not truly one, but truly two... even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both...

We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.

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

Three,' reckoned the captain, 'ourselves make seven, counting Hawkins, here. Now, about honest hands?'Most likely Trelawney's own men," said the doctor; 'those he had picked up for himself, before he lit on Silver.'Nay,' replied the squire. 'Hands was one of mine.'I did think I could have trusted Hands,' added the captain.

And then, all of a sudden, he stopped, and his jaw dropped as though he had remembered something."The score!" he burst out. "Three goes o' rum! Why, shiver my timbers, if I hadn't forgotten my score!"And, falling on a bench, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining; and we laughed together, peal after peal, until the tavern rang again.

From the bonny bells of heather,They brewed a drink long syne,Was sweeter far than honey,Was stronger far than wine.They brewed it and they drank it,And lay in blessed swound,For days and days together,In their dwellings underground.There rose a King in Scotland,A fell man to his foes,He smote the Picts in battle,He hunted them like roes.Over miles of the red mountainHe hunted as they fled,And strewed the dwarfish bodiesOf the dying and the dead.Summer came in the country,Red was the heather bell,But the manner of the brewing,Was none alive to tell.In graves that were like children__On many a mountain__ head,The Brewsters of the HeatherLay numbered with the dead.The king in the red moorlandRode on a summer__ day;And the bees hummed and the curlewsCried beside the way.The King rode and was angry,Black was his brow and pale,To rule in a land of heather,And lack the Heather Ale.It fortuned that his vassals,Riding free upon the heath,Came on a stone that was fallenAnd vermin hid beneath.Roughly plucked from their hiding,Never a word they spoke:A son and his aged father __ast of the dwarfish folk.The king sat high on his charger,He looked down on the little men;And the dwarfish and swarthy coupleLooked at the king again.Down by the shore he had them:And there on the giddy brink ___ will give thee life ye vermin,For the secret of the drink.__here stood the son and fatherAnd they looked high and low;The heather was red around them,The sea rumbled below.And up spoke the father,Shrill was his voice to hear:__ have a word in private,A word for the royal ear.__ife is dear to the aged,And honour a little thing;I would gladly sell the secret_,Quoth the Pict to the King.His voice was small as a sparrow__,And shrill and wonderful clear:__ would gladly sell my secret,Only my son I fear.__or life is a little matter,And death is nought to the young;And I dare not sell my honour,Under the eye of my son.Take him, O king, and bind him,And cast him far in the deep;And it__ I will tell the secretThat I have sworn to keep.__hey took the son and bound him,Neck and heels in a thong,And a lad took him and swung him,And flung him far and strongAnd the sea swallowed his body,Like that of a child of ten;And there on the cliff stood the father,Last of the dwarfish men.__rue was the word I told you:Only my son I feared;For I doubt the sapling courage,That goes without the beard.But now in vain is the torture,Fire shall not avail:Here dies in my bosomThe secret of the Heather Ale.

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

Alan," cried I, "what makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow?"Deed, and I don't, know" said Alan. "For just precisely what I thought I liked about ye, was that ye never quarrelled:__nd now I like ye better!

Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.

To be feared of a thing and yet to do it, is what makes the prettiest kind of a man.