Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 14

And there has been no attempt to investigate it,' I said, 'to see what it really is?''Eh, Cornel,' said the coachman's wife, 'wha would investigate, as ye call it, a thing that nobody believes in? Ye would be the laughing-stock of a' the country-side, as my man says.''But you believe in it,' I said, turning upon her hastily. The woman was taken by surprise. She made a step backward out of my way.'Lord, Cornel, how ye frichten a body! Me! there's awful strange things in this world. An unlearned person doesna ken what to think. But the minister and the gentry they just laugh in your face. Inquire into the thing that is not! Na, na, we just let it be.' ("The Open Door")
Mrs. Oliphant
I now think it takes more faith to name our need than to keep believing that something will happen and not doing anything about it. It takes faith, and great courage, to get help, to take the first painful step toward the dream that is in our hearts...I know now that you can look at bricks and cement for years, believing in the vision of a home, but until you get down on your hands and knees and start to build, it will remain a dream.
Sheila Walsh
There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.
Robert Burns
All children think unkindly of their parents at some time or another
Kenneth MacKenzie
You must give him time,' said her grandmother;'and you must be content not to be believed for a while. It is very hard to bear; but I have had to bear it, and shall have to bear it yet. I will take care of what Curdie thinks of you in the end. You must let him go now.
George MacDonald
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?
Sara Sheridan
I believe that being able to communicate directly with readers is a boon. I certainly enjoy it as much as they do.
Sara Sheridan
Our archives are treasure troves - a testament to many lives lived and the complexity of the way we move forward. They contain clues to the real concerns of day-to-day life that bring the past alive.
Sara Sheridan
Upon the whole, Chymistry is as yet but an opening science, closely connected with the useful and ornamental arts, and worthy the attention of the liberal mind. And it must always become more and more so: for though it is only of late, that it has been looked upon in that light, the great progress already made in Chymical knowledge, gives us a pleasant prospect of rich additions to it. The Science is now studied on solid and rational grounds. While our knowledge is imperfect, it is apt to run into error: but Experiment is the thread that will lead us out of the labyrinth.
Joseph Black
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.
Sara Sheridan
Then I wondered why on earth would anyone ever stand in the world as if standing in the cornucopic middle of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon but inside a tiny white-painted rectangle about the size of a single space in a car park, refusing to come out of it, and all around her or him the whole world, beautiful, various, waiting?
Ali Smith
Always be a little kinder than necessary.
Sir James M. Barrie
One day we will all stand alone and answer to God for the choices we have made in our lives. It will not be enough to say we did not get help because no one would come with us. Life is not easy, but we make it much more difficult when we refuse to be honest about what we feel. For the short term, not being honest may seem easier, but in the long haul, we pay a heavy price.
Sheila Walsh
Be a philosopher but amid all your philosophy be still a man.
David Hume
There is nothing in nature which approximates to the idea of a hospice.
Jim Crumley
Don't keep forever on the public road,going only where others have gone, and following one after the other like a flock of sheep. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. 'Every time you do so you will be certain to find something that you have never seen before. Of course it will be a little thing, but do not ignore it. Follow it up, explore all around it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about to occupy your mind. All really big discoveries are the results of thought.
Alexander Graham Bell
We shall all respect the principle of each other and do nothing that would be regarded as an act oppression to any portion of the people
Alexander Mackenzie
The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever becoming one.”"Don't vote. It just encourages them....
Billy Connolly
One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—-Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—-if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them.
George MacDonald
What an idiot I'd been. What a spoilt brat. What a bloody fool.
David Millar
I thought I had to be alone to be free. But I am only ever truly myself when I am with you, Azhar. I know, that is such an -- an extravagant thing to say, but it is true. I have to realize that freedom means having the ability to choose. To choose to share your life, to choose to love unconditionally. The two are inseparable. There is no freedom without love and there is no love without freedom.
Marguerite Kaye
I had loved poetry and the theatre. Now I loved adventure more.
Sara Sheridan
Some saints cannot do menial work while maintaining a saintly attitude because they feel such service is beneath their dignity.
Oswald Chambers
Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.
James Robertson
The smell of roasting meat rose from the street stalls in a sizzle and a fiddle player begged for coin as he rasped a haunting melody. Life could not be more perfect.
Sara Sheridan
Divorce lawyers stoke anger and fear in their clients, knowing that as long as the conflicts remain unresolved the revenue stream will keep flowing.
Craig Ferguson
It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.
Iain M. Banks
Procrastination is the kidnapper of souls, and the recruiting-officer of Hell.
Edward Irving
Guess that's thirty-one pieces of silver you've got now, huh? Sleep well, Judas.
Mark Millar
This is a sane wholesome practical working faith: That it is a man's business to do the will of God second that God himself takes on the care of that man and third that therefore that man ought never to be afraid of anything.
George MacDonald
Reticence was clearly a national characteristic, even if the other person spoke French.
Sara Sheridan
Maman’s life was an unfinished book. Celeste had to discover the ending, and then she could close the cover for ever.
Marguerite Kaye
You must rely on reason and science,” she said, “and be guided by a likewise rational ethic of human concern. You must do your utmost as individuals to improve your understanding, ability and compassion.
Ken MacLeod
Explanation is where the mind rests.
David Hume
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.
Sara Sheridan
The town is mobbed out with Saturday shoppers looking for Christmas bargains. You can almost breathe in the raw greed which hangs in the air like vapour. As the late afternoon darkness falls, the lights look tacky and sinister.
Irvine Welsh
You say "But He has not answered." He has He is so near to you that His silence is the answer. His silence is big with terrific meaning that you cannot understand yet but presently you will.
Oswald Chambers
In these few seconds Finn lived such a long time, that the marble fell back into the bottom of an exhausted world.
Neil M. Gunn
It is not by driving away our brother that we can be alone with God.
George MacDonald
This was true enough, though it did not throw any light upon my perplexity. If we had heard of it to start with, it is possible that all the family would have considered the possession of a ghost a distinct advantage. It is the fashion of the times. We never think what a risk it is to play with young imaginations, but cry out, in the fashionable jargon, 'A ghost! - nothing else was wanted to make it perfect.' I should not have been above this myself. I should have smiled, of course, at the idea of the ghost at all, but then to feel that it was mine would have pleased my vanity. Oh, yes, I claim no exemption. The girls would have been delighted. I could fancy their eagerness, their interest, and excitement. No; if we had been told, it would have done no good - we should have made the bargain all the more eagerly, the fools that we are. ("The Open Door")
Mrs. Oliphant
A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.
George MacDonald
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another...
Adam Smith
Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.
David Hume
The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;She shines on thieves on the garden wall,On streets and fields and harbour quays,And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees.
Robert Louis Stevenson
O Life! thou art a galling load Along a rough a weary road to wretches such as I.
Robert Burns
Of all the paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path ... a thing which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do ... to find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
When you need to borrow money the Mob seems like a better deal I think. 'You don't pay me back I break both yer legs.' Is that all? You won't take my house or wreck my credit rating? Fine where do I sign. Legs? Fine. You don't even have to sign anything.
Craig Ferguson
But search the land of living men Where wilt thou find their like again.
Sir Walter Scott
Even as good shone upon the countenance of the one, evil was written broadly and plainly on the face of the other. Evil besides (which I must still believe to be the lethal side of man) had left on that body an imprint of deformity and decay. And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome. This, too, was myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
One additional unit of income can do a hundred times as much to the benefit the extreme poor as it can to benefit you or I [earning the typical US wage of $28,000 or ‎£18,000 per year]. [I]t's not often you have two options, one of which is a hundred times better than the other. Imagine a happy hour where you could either buy yourself a beet for $5 or buy someone else a beer for 5¢. If that were the case, we'd probably be pretty generous – next round's on me! But that's effectively the situation we're in all the time. It's like a 99% off sale, or buy one, get ninety-nine free. It might be the most amazing deal you'll see in your life.
William MacAskill
...To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, ‘I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;’ to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary,—this is the victory that overcometh the world.To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream;to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for a godless repose;—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love.‘I am weak,’ says the true soul, ‘but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame but that I would walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to his beloved while they sleep!
George MacDonald
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.
George MacDonald
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a millrace in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.
Robert Louis Stevenson
No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake....
Alexander Trocchi
We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation.
Kathleen Jamie
Mirabelle was always an enigma, and he had the sense that if he pushed her, she’d bolt.
Sara Sheridan
Man is a tool-using animal.
Thomas Carlyle
Our understanding of God is the answer to prayer getting things from God is God's indulgence of us. When God stops giving us things He brings us into the place where we can begin to understand Him.
Oswald Chambers
London was one of the worst places to have a bad day and one of the best places to have a good day
Mhairi McFarlane
I have always considered David Hume as approaching as nearly the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.
Adam Smith