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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?"
"It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted."
"Some saints cannot do menial work while maintaining a saintly attitude because they feel such service is beneath their dignity."
"His religion at best is an anxious wish - like that of Rebelais a great Perhaps."
"Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further."
"You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving."
"Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes."
"Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!"
"A strong mind always hopes, and has always cause to hope."
"Surely of all 'rights of man', this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest."
"Britain is not a country that is easily rocked by revolution... In Britain our institutions evolve. We are a Fabian Society writ large."
"Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is."
"The mark of a good action is that it appears inevitable in retrospect."
"It is a great shame for anyone to listen to the accusation that Islam is a lie and that Muhammad was a fabricator and a deceiver. We saw that he remained steadfast upon his principles, with firm determination; kind and generous, compassionate, pious, virtuous, with real manhood, hardworking and sincere. Besides all these qualities, he was lenient with others, tolerant, kind, cheerful and praiseworthy and perhaps he would joke and tease his companions. He was just, truthful, smart, pure, magnanimous and present-minded; his face was radiant as if he had lights within him to illuminate the darkest of nights; he was a great man by nature who was not educated in a school nor nurtured by a teacher as he was not in need of any of this."
"I should not be surprised," said Mr. Graham, "that the day should come when men will refuse to believe in God simply on the ground of the apparent injustice of things. They would argue that there might be either an omnipotent being who did not care, or a good being who could not help, but that there could not be a being both all good and omnipotent or else he would never have suffered things to be as they are."
"It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless-he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value-a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag."
"Work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind."
"This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it."
"We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series."
"Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy."
"The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being."
"The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born."
"The truth is that Leon, like a lot of those - maybe everyone - who trips on acid, never really came back. he recovered but he was never the same guy again. He had lost something - innocence of hell. Acid presses a little button in your mind that should never be pressed"
"For, if a good speaker, never so eloquent, does not see into the fact, and is not speaking the truth of that - is there a more horrid kind of object in creation?"
"When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze."
"To say that 'prayer changes things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'prayer changes me and then I change things.' God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things."
"The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion."
"All of our affairs, since the union of crowns, have been managed by the advice of English ministers, and the principal offices of the kingdom filled with such men, as the court of England knew would be subservient to their designs."
"We become side-tracked if we make physical health our aim and imagine that because we are children of God we shall always be perfectly well."
"Biography is the only true history."
"The sympathy which is reverent with what it cannot understand is worth its weight in gold."
"Wherever we are it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else and whatever we do however well we do it it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different."
"So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend."
"I thought you were supposed to be flying this thing, not pleasuring it."
"There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write."
"He missed an invaluable opportunity to hold his tongue."
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