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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away."
"Creative people who can't help but explore other mental territories are at greater risk, just as someone who climbs a mountain is more at risk than someone who just walks along a village lane."
"The Irish seem to have more fire about them than the Scots."
"It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger."
"On the road from the City of Skepticism, I had to pass through the Valley of Ambiguity."
"There's a lot of fantasy about what Scotland is, and the shortbread tins and that sort of thing."
"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."
"Of all acts of man repentance is the most divine. The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none."
"Do the duty which lies nearest to you, the second duty will then become clearer."
"I've always wanted to go to Switzerland to see what the army does with those wee red knives."
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."
"Perhaps I'm not a good actor, but I would be even worse at doing anything else."
"Conviction is worthless unless it is converted into conduct."
"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."
"I have written on all sorts of subjects... yet I have no enemies; except indeed all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians."
"Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair."
"Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory."
"In teaching, I wanted to offer a general pharmacology course based on chemical principles, biochemical classification and mathematical modelling. In the event I achieved neither of my ambitions."
"But who can paint like Nature? Can imagination boast, amid its gay creation, hues like hers?"
"I find it useful to remember, everyone lives by selling something."
"Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings."
"He that can work is a born king of something."
"A fair day's wages for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of government."
"God will not permit any troubles to come upon us, unless He has a specific plan by which great blessing can come out of the difficulty."
"Look to the past and remember no empire rises that sooner or later won't fall."
"I played music all through school and I kind of performed that way."
"I think my recognizability ebbs and flows. I don't lead a particularly celebrity lifestyle or anything like that. I don't go to showbiz parties or red-carpet events, so it all depends on whether I've got a film out. I've not been very visible in the last year or so and as a result hardly anyone stops me in the street."
"I was a new devotee of Eastern mysticism and even though I did not join that particular group, I could well have done. They seemed a bit extreme but I regarded myself as not quite ready."
"The desert has its holiness of silence, the crowd its holiness of conversation."
"Man, in his animal capacity, is qualified to subsist in every climate."
"Whenever a snowflake leaves the sky, it turns and turns to say Good-by!"
"This may be done by grafting, by confining the roots, withholding water, bending the branches, or in a hundred other ways which all proceed upon the same principle."
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