Play
The archive, at your fingertips
Try an author, a thought, or a phrase in “quotes”.↑ ↓ Navigate · Esc Close

0 words found

Explore all results ↗
RLRobert Louis Stevenson

186 collected words

Robert Louis Stevenson

Life dates: 1850 AD — 1894 AD

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote essays as well as fiction. His reflections on hopeful work and ordinary kindness reward reading in context, with anthology variants kept visible.

▷ Play this voiceSearch these words ↗Place in time ↗friendshipknowledgetruthlovelifehappinessdeathwealth

Life and writing

The Robert Louis Stevenson website’s timeline records his birth in Edinburgh in November 1850 and death in December 1894. It places the publication of Virginibus Puerisque in April 1881 and describes his later move to Samoa. These lifetime and publication dates orient the writer’s career; they do not date the composition of the archive’s individual excerpts. The archive retains its original undated source records rather than replacing their dates with the profile’s independently referenced lifetime.

Two historical selections lead into different essay arguments. El Dorado ends by placing hopeful effort above the imagined final satisfaction of arrival. A Christmas Sermon presents honesty, kindness, restraint and friendship as demanding ordinary responsibilities. The linked editions preserve differences from the anthology: the journey passage has hands and ye where the anthology has bands and we, while the sermon includes grim condition and all that. Reading those paragraphs in place shows their rhetorical setting without silently rewriting the archive or treating either sentence as an unconditional rule.

Reading this voice

Start with El Dorado’s last paragraph in the 1897 edition, then read XII, A Christmas Sermon, in the 1915 Across the Plains. Both selected anthology paragraphs differ from these linked texts. The journey passage changes bands/hands, we/ye and labor/labour; the sermon omits grim and that and adds to before be embittered. Existing wording and URLs stay intact. The profile does not independently authenticate the contributor-supplied quotations associated with this name, and the lifetime years are not excerpt composition dates.

Subjects to explore

hopeworkkindnesshonesty

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

07c. 1872 AD
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—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 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 / quote
↗
08c. 1872 AD
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
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
↗
17c. 1872 AD
These (Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo) not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast, and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a little further on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable. The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs. He follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and the change is of precisely the same nature as that from melody to harmony.-ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
↗
19c. 1872 AD
Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank You for this place in which we dwell, for the love accorded us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors; if it may not, give us strength to endure that which is to come that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another. We beseech of you this help and mercy for Christ's sake.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
↗
22c. 1872 AD
To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.
Robert Louis Stevenson / quote
↗