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"However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being-that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills."
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Exlpore more Self quotes
"If you want to live within the definition of your own truth, you have to choose to go through the painful process of finding it."
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"We must design how we wish to be perceived, and then we must work even harder to continuously recreate and re-evaluate that perception."
"Cut the connection between your clothes and your beliefs, because clothes will not make you something, it won't make you honest or dishonest, good or bad! Your essence will not change because of what you wear!"
"We must carefully cultivate the voice that speaks to us because an internal voice is the ultimate narrator of our charming and delightful personal story or the documentarian of our tragic and disgraceful plotlines. Stories that we tell ourselves become our functional reality, which format structures the concourse of the nested emotional control panel that guides and girds us through the din of the present."
"Why do you want to fall in love when love is inside you?"
"Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention."
"When you give your mind, body, and heart the message that you are worth the effort of being conscious, miraculous things start to happen."
Explore more quotes by Alexander McCall Smith
"What we have, we all must lose-that applied to everything, even to that which we thought we had the greatest right. We were tenants of this earth-nothing more."
"There was no point in telling somebody not to cry, she had always thought; indeed there were times when you should do exactly the opposite, when you should urge people to cry, to start the healing that sometimes only tears can bring. But if there was a place for tears of relief, there might even be a place for tears of pride."
"She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because if you did not forget, then your forgiveness would be tested, perhaps many times and in ways that you could not resist, and you might go back to anger, and to hating."
"Morality is for everybody, and this means that the views of more than one person are needed to create it. That was what made the modern morality, with its emphasis on individuals and the working out of an individual position, so weak. If you gave people the chance to work out their morality, then they would work out the version which was easiest for them and which allowed them to do what suited them for as much of the time as possible. That, in Mma Ramotswe's view, was simple selfishness, whatever grand name one gave to it."
"Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else."
"Men, she thought, were odd about their clothes: they liked to wear the same things until they became defeated and threadbare."
"How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?"
"Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was."
"She knew as well as anyone that the world could be a place of trial and sorrow, that there was injustice and suffering and heartlessness - there was enough of all that to fill the great Kalahari twice over, but what good did it do to ponder that and that alone? None, she thought."
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