Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Quotes

“We are three very old friends, Lanyon; we shall not live to make others.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“That evening Mr. Utterson came home to his bachelor house in sombre spirits and sat down to dinner without relish. It was his custom of a Sunday, when this meal was over, to sit close by the fire, a volume of some dry divinity on his reading-desk, until the clock of the neighbouring church rang out the hour of twelve, when he would go soberly and gratefully to bed. On this night, however, as soon as the cloth was taken away, he took up a candle and went into his business-room. There he opened his safe, took from the most private part of it a document endorsed on the envelope as Dr. Jekyll’s Will, and sat down with a clouded brow to study its contents. The will was holograph, for Mr. Utterson, though he took charge of it now that”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Nella maggior parte degli uomini, le ragioni del bene e del male che dividono e insieme compongono la duplice natura dell'uomo.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Musisz pozwolić mi odejść w ciemność własną drogą.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Kara nadciąga pede claudo*, lata po tym jak umarła pamięć o winie, a miłość własna dokonała przebaczenia.

*pede claudo (łac.) - cichym krokiem”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“But the temptation of a discovery so singular and profound at last overcame the suggestions of alarm.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“[T]he doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“when I was seized again with those indescribable sensations that heralded the change; and I had but the time to gain the shelter of my cabinet, before I was once again raging and freezing with the passions of Hyde. It”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“But time began at last to obliterate the freshness of my alarm; the praises of conscience began to grow into a thing of course; I began to be tortured with throes and longings, as of Hyde struggling after freedom; and at last, in an hour of moral weakness, I once again compounded and swallowed the transforming draught.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Utterson became so used to the unvarying character of these reports, that he fell off little by little in the frequency of his visits.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“He thanked me with a smiling nod, measured out a few minims of the red tincture and added one of the powders. The mixture, which was at first of a reddish hue, began, in proportion as the crystals melted, to brighten in colour, to effervesce audibly, and to throw off small fumes of vapour. Suddenly and at the same moment, the ebullition ceased and the compound changed to a dark purple, which faded again more slowly to a watery green. My visitor, who had watched these metamorphoses with a keen eye, smiled, set down the glass upon the table, and then turned and looked upon me with an air of scrutiny.

"And now," said he, "to settle what remains. Will you be wise? will you be guided? will you suffer me to take this glass in my hand and to go forth from your house without further parley? or has the greed of curiosity too much command of you? Think before you answer, for it shall be done as you decide. As you decide, you shall be left as you were before, and neither richer nor wiser, unless the sense of service rendered to a man in mortal distress may be counted as a kind of riches of the soul. Or, if you shall so prefer to choose, a new province of knowledge and new avenues to fame and power shall be laid open to you, here, in this room, upon the instant; and your sight shall be blasted by a prodigy to stagger the unbelief of Satan.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate identities, life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together—that in the agonised womb of consciousness, these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then were they dissociated?”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think of it-I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.
The pleasures which I made haste to seek in my disguise were, as I have said, undignified; I would scarce use a harder term. But in the hands of Edward Hyde, they soon began to turn toward the monstrous. When I would come back from these excursions, I was often plunged into a kind of wonder at my vicarious depravity. This familiar that I called out of my own soul, and sent forth alone to do his good pleasure, was a being inherently malign and villainous; his every act and thought centered on self; drinking pleasure with bestial avidity from any degree of torture to another; relentless like a man of stone. Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, where it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.”
― Stevenson Robert Louis, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“I do not suppose that, when a drunkard reasons with himself upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my position, made enough allowance for the complete moral insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Yes,” he thought; “he is a doctor, he must know his own state and that his days are counted; and the knowledge is more than he can bear.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Well, life has been pleasant; I liked it; yes, sir, I used to like it. I sometimes think if we knew all, we should be more glad to get away.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“The figure in these two phases haunted the lawyer all night: and if at any time he dozed over, it was but to see it glide more stealthily through sleeping houses, or move the more swiftly and still the more swiftly, even to dizziness, through wider labyrinths of lamp-lighted city, and at every street corner crush a child and leave her screaming.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“STORY OF THE DOOR Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable. At friendly meetings, and when the wine was to his taste, something”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn't like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder, the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“In the bottle the acids were long ago resolved; the imperial dye had softened with time, as the colour grows richer in stained windows; and the glow of hot autumn afternoons on hillside vineyards, was ready to be set free and to disperse the fogs of London.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“His friends were those of his own blood or those whom he had known the longest; his affections, like ivy, were the growth of time, they implied no aptness in the object.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Che quell'orrore insorgente fosse legato a lui più di una moglie, fosse più intimo di un occhio; che giacesse rinchiuso nella sua carne, dove lo sentiva ululare e lottare per venire alla luce; e che nei momenti di debolezza e quando si abbandonava al sonno lo dominasse e lo escludesse dalla vita.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Che lo volessi o no, ero omai confinato nella parte migliore della mia esistenza. Quanto godetti di questo pensiero!”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Jekyll provava moltopiù che l'interesse di un padre; Hyde molto meno che l'indifferenza di un figlio.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“L'uomo sarà infine conosciuto come un conglomerato di svariate entità, incoerenti e indipendenti l'una dall'altra.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

“Zła cząstka natury, wyzwolona obecnie i sprawująca władzę była cieleśnie słabsza i gorzej rozwinięta niż dobra, którą odtrąciłem. Zarazem jednak mniej utrudziła się i wyczerpała, gdyż dotychczas dziewięć dziesiątych życia poświęcałem przecież pracy, cnocie i świadomemu, poddanemu rygorom obowiązku działaniu. Dlatego właśnie Edward Hyde był znacznie niższy, szczuplejszy i młodszy niż Henryk Jekyll. Jedną twarz rozjaśniał blask wewnętrznego światła, na drugiej mroki zła wyryły głębokie piętno. Ponadto zło (mimo wszystko słabsze w człowieku niż dobro) zniekształciło i jak gdyby okaleczyło całą postać swojego wcielenia.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde