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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"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."
"To become what we are capable of becoming is the only end in life."
"I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion."
"If you can walk you can dance. Zimbabwe saying Music is well said to be the speech of angels."
"The word of Mohammad is a voice direct from nature's own heart - all else is wind in comparison."
"To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and fall."
"God does not exist to answer our prayers but by our prayers we come to discern the mind of God."
"Muscat is like a mind-altering drug. A stroll in its streets is like getting drunk for the first time."
"I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect."
"I can but pray the Father o' a' to haud his e'e upon her, an' his airms aboot her, an' keep aff the hardenin' o' the hert 'at despises coonsel!"
"As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book."
"It were a real increase of human happiness, could all young men from the age of nineteen be covered under barrels, or rendered otherwise invisible; and there left to follow their lawful studies and callings, till they emerged, sadder and wiser, at the age of twenty-five."
"The world is changing and you're only just becoming accustomed to it. You're changing, I suppose. You've changed since I've known you.''How?''You've come more alive."
"Music is well said to be the speech of angels."
"The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons strategems and spoils but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem."
"I thought of myself mixing the fragrance of a certain day " the heavy musk of the hillside after the rain with the lightness of fresh blossoms doused in the downpour. I thought of each little bottle as the essence of a happy day or a sad one. I mixed the scent of a lonely moment " sandalwood and bergamot lingering over a rich, peppery base."
"We must continually maintain an adventurous attitude toward Him, despite any potential personal risk."
"I think comedy as an art involves the audience as a participant as much as is involves the artist."
"O Lord, I have been talking to the people;Thought's wheels have round me whirled a fiery zoneAnd the recoil of my word's airy rippleMy heart unheedful has puffed up and blown.Therefore I cast myself before thee prone:Lay cool hands on my burning brain and press From my weak heart the swelling emptiness."
"Writers are a product of where we come from but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it."
"If in preaching the gospel you substitute your knowledge of the way of salvation for confidence in the power of the gospel, you hinder people from getting to reality."
"I was ambitious and desperate to direct my first film, so I capitulated and blew it. Never again. Never fucking again."
"The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes."
"I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _desillusionnes_, for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real."
"If through a broken heart God can bring His purposes to pass in the world, then thank Him for breaking your heart."
"Human nature if it healthy demands excitement and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way it will seek it in the wrong. God never makes bloodless stoics He makes no passionless saints."
"Allowances can always be made for your friends to disagree with you. Disagreement, vehement disagreement, is healthy. Debate is impossible without it. Evil does not question itself, only hope questions itself. Even the incorruptible are corruptible if they cannot accept the possibility of being mistaken. Infallibility is a sin in any man. All laws can be broken and are. Often. Like when a bumblebee flies or an ancient regime is toppled."
"Punishment had not been spared--with best results in patience and purification."
"All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely it will keep its word."
"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books."
"At the end of the day, that's what a family is - a group of different people who accept each other."
"I fear you will never arrive at an understanding of God so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good that often comes as a result of pain. For there is nothing, from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering to the loftiest acme of pain, to which God does not respond. There is nothing in all the universe which does not in some way vibrate within the heart of God. No creature suffers alone; He suffers with His creatures and through it is in the process of bringing His sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of God, partakers of the divine nature and peace."
"Hey dawg, wassup?' he said, in the strange way that white talent agents from Los Angeles do in an attempt to sound like young black men from underprivileged backgrounds. A linguistic fashion as peculiar as the lisp that everybody in medieval Spain had to adopt after the king developed a speech impediment."
"They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is, on the other hand, a great emboldener."
"You deal with me very frankly, and I thank you for it,' said I. 'I will try on my side to be no less honest. I believe these deep duties may lie upon your lordship; I believe you may have laid them on your conscience when you took the oaths of the high office which you hold. But for me, who am just a plain man--or scarce a man yet--the plain duties must suffice. I can think but of two things, of a poor soul in the immediate and unjust danger of a shameful death, and of the cries and tears of his wife that still tingle in my head. I cannot see beyond, my lord. It's the way I am made. If the country has to fall, it has to fall. And I pray God, if this is wilful blindness, that He may enlighten me before too late."
"It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one's judgement."
"The Saints are the Sinners who keep on trying."
"Reform is not pleasant, but grievous; no person can reform themselves without suffering and hard work, how much less a nation."
"Imagination is a poor matter when it has to part company with understanding."
"Whenever the conviction of God's Spirit comes there is the softening of the whole nature to obey, but if the obedience is not instant there will come a metallic hardening and a corrupting of the guidance of God."
"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."
"Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but primarily by catchwords."
"I'm reading a book, because I'm brainy. No, it is a book - if you don't know, it is like a blog except bigger."
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