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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life."
"Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we're launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence."
"I would say that although my music may be or may have been part of the cultural background fabric of the gay community, I consider myself an outsider who belongs everywhere and nowhere... Being a human being is what truly counts. That's where you'll find me."
"Your background and environment is with you for life. No question about that."
"But He Himself hath sealed your sufferings, and their thus saying condemns God, and His sealing condemns them."
"The chance to be both artistically appreciated and commercially appreciated... That's what you hope for."
"Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus."
"Insanity - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world."
"There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end."
"The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst."
"The real tragedy of the poor is the poverty of their aspirations."
"The Devil, can sometimes do a very gentlemanly thing."
"In fact a lot of them I think are absolute baloney. Those Charles Olsens and people like that. At first I was interested in seeing what they were up to, what they were doing, why they were doing it. They never moved me in the way that one is moved by true poetry."
"Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether."
"No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men."
"I feel very strongly about putting questions; it partakes too much of the style of the day of judgement. You start a question, and it's like starting a stone. You sit quietly on the top of a hill; and away the stone goes, starting others; and presently some bland old bird (the last you would have thought of) is knocked on the head in his own back garden, and the family have to change their name. No, sir, I make it a rule of mine: the more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask."
"Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream."
"Mainly I was able to perform with music - I played the French horn, I would sing, and I was a drummer in the pipe band. So I think it was a way to show off."
"Marriage is a wonderful invention: then again, so is a bicycle repair kit."
"The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils light in your eyes flowers at your feet duties at your hand the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life."
"Please call your second witness, and then call your mother, she worries."
"The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason."
"Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open."
"Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another."
"Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one."
"I got sober. I stopped killing myself with alcohol. I began to think: 'Wait a minute - if I can stop doing this, what are the possibilities?' And slowly it dawned on me that it was maybe worth the risk."
"I think in the corridors of power these dangerous kinds of orders are issued in a much more vague way, passed down two or three levels of command before they're given to the assassin."
"Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion."
"Take a film of Jacques Tati like Mon Oncle which has something quite new - for me, unique - in it."
"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time."
"Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible inculcations of morality."
"Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience."
"Everywhere in life, the true question is not what we gain, but what we do."
"All human beings are commingled out of good and evil."
"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of government."
"Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none."
"Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert."
"To cultivate an English accent is already a departure away from what you are."
"Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."
"Writing is a dreadful labor, yet not so dreadful as Idleness."
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