"There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the ear."

Robert Louis Stevenson Literature See all quotes by Robert Louis Stevenson →

React to this quote

More by Robert Louis Stevenson

“I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. (...) That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have profited or not, that is the way.”

“For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.”

“Nothing like a little judicious levity.”

“To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill.”

“The devil, depend upon it, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing.”

“Sanity itself is a kind of convention.”

Resonant Thoughts

"In the struggle of the centuries, America learned that freedom is not the possession of one race. We know with equal certainty that freedom is not the possession of one nation. This belief in the natu…"

— George W. Bush

Politics1824–1900

#justice

". . .the principle that where there is fear, there will be wrong figures. . . ."

— W. Edwards Deming

Mathematics1900–1993

#ethics

"I maintain, therefore, that just as there is in Cartesianism a methodical idealism, the kind that starts with nosse , there can be a methodical realism, the kind that starts with esse ."

— Étienne Gilson

Philosophy1884–1978

#justice

"The dialogue is laughably cheesy throughout, but perhaps that's part of Basic Instinct's appeal. In fact, there are times when the film comes close to achieving a status where it's so bad it becomes e…"

— James Berardinelli

Literature1967

#humor