Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 13

There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.
Irvine Welsh
Here's to us, who's like us Damn few, and they're all dead.
Rabbie Burns
And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.
Ali Smith
A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.
Aminatta Forna
War had the effect of encouraging people to try to stay alive. Poverty, too. Survival was simply too hard-won to be given up lightly.
Aminatta Forna
dumb cunts vote for whoever throws the biggest promotional budget at them
Sophie Cooke
The great law of culture: Let each become all that he was created capable of being.
Thomas Carlyle
A writer is like a stick of rock - the words go right through.
Sara Sheridan
Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.
Sara Sheridan
I have never been nervous in all my life and I have no patience with people who are. If you know what you are going to do you have no reason to be nervous. And I knew what I was going to do.
Mary Garden
They were both young men under thirty. Art is not so precocious as literature, and does not send quite so many early potatoes into the market, so that the age of thirty is considered young enough for a painter to have learnt his business sufficiently to be marketable from the picture-dealing point of view. ("The Phantom Model")
Hume Nisbet
And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it.
Ali Smith
Not only then has each man his individual relation to God but each man has his peculiar relation to God.
George MacDonald
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.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!
James Drummond Burns
Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.
Alasdair Gray
There was something about Maria Graham that you could believe in – a slice of home. If not unique in her travelling, she was at least extraordinary.
Sara Sheridan
Why should I laugh?' asked the old man. 'Madness in youth is true wisdom. Go, young man, follow your dream, and if you do not find the happiness that you seek, at any rate you will have had the happiness of seeking it.
Andrew Lang
As far as I was concerned, the best thing one could do for the poor was to not add one’s self to their number.
Ken MacLeod
Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.
Sara Sheridan
Sometimes people think you’re smart if you question the status quo, if nothing else.
Craig Ferguson
What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And meant I inherited his weak lungs? Not relevant to us? her mother says. And then the break-up of the Balkans, and the start of the territorial trouble in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the civil unrest in Ireland, and the shifts of power in Russia, and the power shifts in the Ottoman empire, and the bankruptcy, economic catastrophe and social unrest in Germany, all of which played a huge part in the rise of Fascism and in the bringing about of another war in which, as it happens, your own grandmother and grandfather--who happened to be my mother and father--both fought when they were just two or three years older than you? Not relevant? To us?
Ali Smith
The world's big and I want to have a good look at it before it gets dark.
John Muir
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.
George MacDonald
Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.
Sara Sheridan
Movement turns dead dogs into maggots and daisies, and flour butter sugar an egg and a tablespoon of milk into Abernethy biscuits, and spermatozoa and ovaries into fishy little plants growing babyward if we take no care to stop them.
Alasdair Gray
She had not expected, out in the world, to find herself quite so much the wrong sort of person.
Ali Smith
It is only the fear of God that can deliver us from the fear of men.
John Witherspoon
Hope is brightest when it dawns from fears.
Sir Walter Scott
I love writing and can't imagine not being able to do it. I want an easy life and if it had been difficult doing it I wouldn't be doing it. I do admire writers who do it even though it costs them.
Iain M. Banks
Wine is bottled poetry
Robert Louis Stevenson
Ye are most strong, ye Sons of the icy North, of the far East, far marching from your rugged Eastern Wildernesses, hither-ward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are Sons of the Jotun-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered. Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all Jo'tuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!
Thomas Carlyle
To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations
Adam Smith
What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free—or moral—personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.
R.M. Maciver
Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion.
Grant Morrison
No matter how dark the room gets I can always see. It looks emptier when I put the lights on so I don't do it if I can help it. Brightness disagrees with me: it hurts my eyes, wastes electricity and encourages moths, all sorts of things. I sit in the dark for a number of reasons.
Janice Galloway
Ours is an overpopulated, under educated, shithole in the throes of mass extinctions - it's a wonderful world.
Grant Morrison
I must confess, your gown does not do justice as your trousers did to your delightful derriere."tColour flamed in her face. She ought to be outraged, but Isabella was briefly, shockingly inclined to laugh. "A gentleman does not remark on a lady's derriere."t"I seem to recall telling you when last we met that I am not a gentleman, senorita. And now I come to think of it, I recall also that you took umbrage at being called a lady.
Marguerite Kaye
Literature, although it stands apart by reason of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or as used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and merely presentative.
Robert Louis Stevenson
When Britain first at Heaven's command Arose from out the azure main This was the charter of the land And Guardian angels sung this strain "Rule Britannia! rule the waves Britons never will be slaves."
James Thomson
The notion of children makes me ill. The thought of having one... when you see those guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking idea of it, the very word: family. Whenever I see it, on travel brochures, on house schedules... I feel sick.
John Niven
The VagabondGive to me the life I love,Let the lave go by me,Give the jolly heaven aboveAnd the byway nigh me.Bed in the bush with stars to see,Bread I dip in the river -There's the life for a man like me,There's the life for ever.Let the blow fall soon or late,Let what will be o'er me;Give the face of earth aroundAnd the road before me.Wealth I seek not, hope nor love,Nor a friend to know me;All I seek, the heaven aboveAnd the road below me.Or let autumn fall on meWhere afield I linger,Silencing the bird on tree,Biting the blue finger.White as meal the frosty field -Warm the fireside haven -Not to autumn will I yield,Not to winter even!Let the blow fall soon or late,Let what will be o'er me;Give the face of earth around,And the road before me.Wealth I ask not, hope nor love,Nor a friend to know me;All I ask, the heaven aboveAnd the road below me.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A friend in need is a friend indeed.
Susan Ferrier
We have to combine, certainly, but if we combine to fight on the idea of each man making more money for himself, then we end by fighting one another. And that's the trouble now... human dealings are founded - founded - not on money but on what is fair and just all round.
Neil M. Gunn
When we pray "in the Name of Jesus" the answers are in accordance with His nature and if we think our prayers are unanswered it is because we are not interpreting the answer along this line.
Oswald Chambers
This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent on him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community--the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.
Andrew Carnegie
My greatest challenge is not what's happening at the moment, my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch. And you can print that.
Alex Ferguson
To follow Jesus today is to follow a madman according to the ideals of present day civilization. We have the idea that our civilization is God-ordained, whereas it has been built up by ourselves. We have made a thousand and one necessities until our system of civilized life is as cast iron, and then we apologize to the Lord for not following Him.
Oswald Chambers
Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.
Alasdair Gray
I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.
George MacDonald
When love comes, it comes indiscriminately.
Lesley Lokko
My heart is sair-I dare na tell,My heart is sair for Somebody.
Robert Burns
Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.
Sara Sheridan
an utter walkover with a man who can pen a pretty email
Mhairi McFarlane
Courage is the footstool of the Virtues upon which they stand.
Robert Louis Stevenson
To know what you prefer instead of humbly saying "Amen" to what the world tells you you ought to prefer is to keep your soul alive.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Change occurs slowly. Very often a legal change might take place but the cultural shift required to really accept its spirit lingers in the wings for decades.
Sara Sheridan
Spiritual maturity is not reached by the passing of the years, but by obedience to the will of God. Some people mature into an understanding of God’s will more quickly than others because they obey more readily; they more readily sacrifice the life of nature to the will of God.
Oswald Chambers