Robert Louis Stevenson Quotes

My mother was a waitress in a Lyons Corner House, but she married up. She was keen on bettering herself. She taught me how to use the right knives and forks and behave properly.

And though it is much to be a nobleman, it is more to be a gentleman.

These gardens may be called the gardens of the respectable working classes.

I certainly never get above my station - my family would soon slap me back down to earth.

Certainly I was relatively a refined person. No way a tramp.

I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God's will, but as human being become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of respectability at a commensurate speed.

The rich make life more interesting: they are a luxury a civilized society should be able to afford.

Among civilized peoples, especially the very wealthy population of the United States of America, women have become objects of luxury who consume but do not produce.

In modern civilized communities... the members of each stratum accept as their ideal of decency the scheme of life in vogue in the next higher stratum.

I learned early that class is universally admired.

I'm a nice middle-class girl.

This is one of the stout-hearted old warriors: he is angry with civilization because he supposes that its aim is to make all goodthings--honors, treasures, beautiful women--accessible even to cowards.

Dilemma of civilized man; body mobilized, but danger obscure.

Honour is a luxury for aristocrats, but it is a necessity for hall-porters.

It is in refinement and elegance that the civilized man differs from the savage.

Gentlemen cherish worth; the vulgar cherish dirt. Gentlemen trust in justice; the vulgar trust in favor.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

As long as the Southern colleges have revivals on their campuses and students get converted to Methodism and join the YMCA and are accepted as gentlemen, it will be impossible to think of the South as civilized...The educated folk of the Old South took theology lightly, and religion to them was hardly more than a charming ritual, useful on solemn occassions.

The habits of every animal are, at least in the eyes of man, constantly similar in all ages. But the habits, the clothes, the words and the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a bourgeois, a priest and a pauper, are wholly dissimilar and change at the will of civilizations.

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

A wise man should marry a virgin of a respectable family even if she is deformed. He should not marry one of a low-class family, through beauty. Marriage in a family of equal status is preferable.

It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

Social science affirms that a woman's place in society marks the level of civilization.

I could tell Hugo was convinced that he would get to walk back up these stairs: after all, he was a civilized person. These were all civilized people. Hugo really couldn't imagine that anything irreparable could happen to him, because he was a middle-class white American with a college education, as were all the people on the stairs with us. I had no such conviction. I was not a wholly civilized person.