top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Scottish Authors
"If you treat with courtesy your equal, who is privileged to resent an impertinence, how much more cautious should you be to your dependents, from whom you demand a respectful demeanor."
"But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person."
"Her great merit is finding out mine; there is nothing so amiable as discernment."
"The numbers may be said to rule the whole world of quantity, and the four rules of arithmetic may be regarded as the complete equipment of the mathematician."
"Millions of hells of sinners cannot come near to exhaust infinite grace."
"History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion."
"The courage we desire and prize is not the courage to die decently, but to live manfully."
"In a few years, all great physical constants will have been approximately estimated, and that the only occupation which will be left to men of science will be to carry these measurements to another place of decimals."
"Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light."
"It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern, girt about on every side by clocks and chimes...For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity."
"No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor."
"Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death."
"You will not be carried to Heaven lying at ease upon a feather bed."
"I have always hated machinery, and the only machine I ever understood was a wheelbarrow, and that but imperfectly."
"He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles."
"The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion."
"We all have a dinosaur deep within us just trying to get out."
"The pride of life hath corrupted the judgment of others, and perverted them in the way of religion."
"Our religious belief usurps the place of our sensations, our imaginations of our judgment. We no longer look to actions, trace their consequences, and then deduce the rule; we first make the rule, and then, right or wrong, force the action to square with it."
"It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity."
"The more I read about feeding times, sleep times and waking-up times, the more inadequate and miserable I felt."
"You had better not open that door."
"Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ship's doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenter's mate; John Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce, owner's servants, landsmen--being all that is left faithful of the ship's company--with stores for ten days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew British colours on the log-house in Treasure Island. Thomas Redruth, owner's servant, landsman, shot by the mutineers; James Hawkins, cabin boy--'And at the same time, I was wondering over poor Jim Hawkins' fate."
"My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger."
"Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man."
"A laugh, to be joyous, must flow from a joyous heart, for without kindness, there can be no true joy."
"Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against."
"Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide."
"I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
"We imagine that a little anxiety and worry is an indication of how wise we really are, it may be an indication of how wicked we really are."
"It is a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave."
"We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second."
"Crows are incredibly smart. They can be taught five things on the drop."
"It is just because civilization is ever evolving, changing, and becoming more complicated, that experts find it so difficult to define it in explicit terms."
"We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention."
"My faith has no bed to sleep upon but omnipotence."
"Proving I'm a good mother is the one achievement I'm most proud of. It's brought out the best in me."
bottom of page