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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted."
"Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."
"Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk."
"Trust the Oak, said she; "trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech. Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable. But shun the Ash and the Alder; for the Ash is an ogre,-you will know him by his thick fingers; and the Alder will smother you with her web of hair, if you let her near you at night."
"The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter."
"Books exist for me not as physical entities with pages and binding, but in the province of my mind."
"If there's one shade a woman of colour can't wear it's got to be the one everyone expects, hasn't it?"
"A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology."
"If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else."
"With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy."
"The curve of my waist in a tight fitting summer dress can really make me new friends."
"Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank You for this place in which we dwell, for the love accorded us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors; if it may not, give us strength to endure that which is to come that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another. We beseech of you this help and mercy for Christ's sake."
"Isolation is the sum total of wretchedness to a man."
"The devil was always in the detail. And here the detail was certainly devilish."
"However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make any one conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures."
"I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal."
"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."
"There's nothing like a military man, even out of uniform."
"I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five."
"It's not until you're older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember."
"Prayer is not an exercise it is the life."
"It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing."
"Macaulay is well for awhile but one wouldn't live under Niagara."
"New technologies and resources offer exciting opportunities. They democratise access to information."
"A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder."
"Wellsted will remember this moment for the rest of his life. It is the first time he desires something for himself that is not dedicated to his own advancement. It is the moment he falls in love."
"I have an ambivalent relationship with Margaret Thatcher. She came to power in May 1979 - a month before my 11th birthday. I was far too young to have developed a great deal of political awareness. I remember it, though - my mother excited at the dinner table because Britain had its first female prime minister."
"When God brings a time of waiting, and appears to be unresponsive, don't fill it with busyness, just wait."
"The man of life upright has a guiltless heart, free from all dishonest deeds or thought of vanity."
"In wartime, she thought to herself, you don't call a death murder."
"We must go on, because we can't turn back."
"It is a solemn thing, and no small scandal in the Kingdom, to see God's children starving while actually seated at the Father's table."
"The sympathy which is reverent with what it cannot understand is worth its weight in gold."
"You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving."
"God's "nothings" are His most positive answers. We have to stay on God and wait. Never try to help God to fulfill His word."
"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!"
"It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive."
"Where did you come from baby dear? Out of the Everywhere into here."
"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."
"The best measure of a spiritual life is not its ecstasies but its obedience."
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