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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"Difficulties should act as a tonic. They should spur us to greater exertion."
"There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia,' but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event."
"This avidity alone, of acquiring goods and possessions for ourselves and our nearest friends, is insatiable, perpetual, universal, and directly destructive of society."
"We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love."
"It's a sort of bloom on a woman. If you have it, you don't need to have anything else; and if you don't have it, it doesn't much matter what else you have."
"He who has faith has... an inward reservoir of courage, hope, confidence, calmness, and assuring trust that all will come out well - even though to the world it may appear to come out most badly."
"I'm just drawing it now. It's totally revolting. I'm sure you'll love it."
"When we love anyone with our whole hearts, life begins when we are with that person; it is only in their company that we are really and truly alive."
"Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious."
"Work is the meat of life, pleasure the dessert."
"To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education."
"The tragedy of life and of the world is not that men do not know God; the tragedy is that, knowing Him, they still insist on going their own way."
"Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness."
"As a kid I watched television 24 hours a day and loved every minute of it. The two shows that always make me laugh and are therefore my favourites are The Dick Van Dyke Show and Fawlty Towers."
"I am a contradictory mess but I see it as my prerogative to change my mood like the weather."
"Men ever follow willingly a daring leader: most willingly of all, in great emergencies."
"One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests."
"The chief benefit, which results from philosophy, arises in an indirect manner, and proceeds more from its secret, insensible influence, than from its immediate application."
"Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition."
"If you wish to make a man look noble, your best course is to kill him. What superiority he may have inherited from his race, what superiority nature may have personally gifted him with, comes out in death."
"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
"I have been a man of great sins, but He has been a God of great mercies; and now, through His mercies, I have a conscience as sound and quiet as if I had never sinned."
"I've signed on for four movies, and I'll do four. That's easy. No complications there."
"Well - I started writing - probably in the early 60s and by say '65-'66 I had read most of the poetry that had been published - certainly in the 20 years prior to that."
"All I ever promised was that I was sure I could develop a new pharmacological agent which might answer a physiological question. Any utility would be implicit in that answer."
"The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture."
"I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom."
"After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed."
"If there be no enemy there's no fight. If no fight, no victory and if no victory there is no crown."
"The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat."
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