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Quotes by Scottish Authors
"It is by no haphazard chance that in every age men have risen early to pray. The first thing that marks decline in spiritual life is our relationship to the early morning."
"The main characteristic which is the proof of the indwelling Spirit is an amazing tenderness in personal dealing, and a blazing truthfulness with regard to God's Word."
"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
"Never say you will pray about a thing pray about it."
"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."
"Remember whose you are and whom you serve."
"I have never met the man I could despair of after discerning what lies in me apart from the grace of God."
"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!"
"This simple accident of falling in love is as beneficial as it is astonishing."
"Aye, I'm tellin' ye, happiness is one of the few things in this world that doubles every time you share it with someone else."
"Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better, Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time."
"Maria didn't fear the sea but, as taught by her father, she respected its power. In her experience the ocean had no intent to drown travellers."
"He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness."
"For marriage is like life in this-that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses."
"There are vast areas of stubbornness and ignorance the Holy Spirit has to reveal in each of us, but it can only be done when Jesus gets us alone...Jesus cannot teach us anything until we quiet all our intellectual questions and get alone with Him."
"It may take a village to raise a baby, but hell! it takes an army to produce a book."
"I didn't expect to love being online as much as I do. I've met some wonderful people and discovered that however arcane some of my interests that there are people out there who are interested too."
"The greatest answer to prayer is that I am brought into a perfect understanding with God and that alters my view of actual things."
"Our ordinary and reasonable service to God may actually compete against our total surrender to Him."
"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."
"What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things. It is not that I will not hear God, but I am not devoted in the right place. I am devoted to things, to service, to convictions, and God may say what He likes but I do not hear Him."
"It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other rest for heart and soul than He has created. From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set us free."
"All work is seed sown. It grows and spreads and sows itself anew."
"Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement."
"If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise."
"God cannot deliver me while my interest is merely in my own character. Paul was not conscious of himself. He was recklessly abandoned, totally surrendered, and separated by God for one purpose--to proclaim the gospel of God."
"Happiness and goodness, according to canting moralists, stand in the relation of effect and cause. There was never anything less proved or less probable: our happiness is never in our own hands; we inherit our constitution; we stand buffet among friends and enemies; we may be so built as to feel a sneer or an aspersion with unusual keenness and so circumstanced as to be unusually exposed to them; we may have nerves very sensitive to pain, and be afflicted with a disease very painful. Virtue will not help us, and it is not meant to help us."
"Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind."
"I can't bear literary snobbery."
"Narrow all your interests until your mind, heart, and body are focused on Jesus Christ."
"Whenever we put other things first, there is confusion."
"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."
"If we indulge in inordinate affection, anger, anxiety, God holds us responsible; but He also insists that we have to be passionately filled with the right emotions."
"I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil."
"Many of us do not continue to grow spiritually because we prefer to choose on the basis of our rights, instead of relying on God to make the choice for us."
"Didn't young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?"
"Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is."
"Saints are sinners who kept on going."
"I believe that being able to communicate directly with readers is a boon. I certainly enjoy it as much as they do."
"When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God's throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people."
"The whole meaning of prayer is that we may know God."
"Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep."
"Give me a man who sings at his work."
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