David Balfour Quotes

“A good conscience is eight parts of courage.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, David Balfour

“You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man--or scarce a man yet--the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, David Balfour

“It is the fate of sequels to disappoint those who have waited for them; and my David, having been left to kick his heels for more than a lustre in the British Linen Company’s office, must expect his late re-appearance to be greeted with hoots, if not with missiles.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Catriona: Being Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour at Home and Abroad

“But that's the strange thing about you folk of the college learning: ye're ignorant, and ye canna see't. Wae's me for my Greek and Hebrew; but, man, I ken that I dinna ken them--- there's the differ of it.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, David Balfour