Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 20

Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.
Sara Sheridan
The degree of panic activity in my life is equal to the degree of my lack of personal spiritual experience.
Oswald Chambers
What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking.
Sara Sheridan
A dread filled me, a dread unlike any I had ever felt. Not the terror of God, or his angels, but the sickly fear of man.
Aminatta Forna
To love abundantly is to live abundantly, and to love forever is to live forever.
Henry Drummond
Silence is more eloquent than words.
Thomas Carlyle
Courage is the thing. All goes if courage goes.
Sir James M. Barrie
Forgiveness is the giving and so the receiving of life.
George MacDonald
Never be afraid when God brings back your past. Let your memory have its way with you. It is a minister of God bringing its rebuke and sorrow to you.
Oswald Chambers
To bear is to conquer our fate.
Thomas Campbell
If our shallow, self-critical culture sometimes seems to lack a sense of the numinous or spiritual it's only in the same way a fish lacks a sense of the ocean.
Grant Morrison
My books are friends that never fai
Thomas Carlyle
What makes the hero truly greatis never, never to despair.
Robert Burns
We must go on, because we can't turn back.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Men like fun much more than they like clever
Mhairi McFarlane
Over the summit, I saw the so-called Mono desert lying dreamily silent in the thick, purple light -- a desert of heavy sun-glare beheld from a desert of ice-burnished granite.
John Muir
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.
Robert Burns
He closed his eyes and allowed himself to remember the taste of her and the feel of her and the smell of her. She was quite lovely. She was altogether ravishing. She would set any man's blood on fire. He shouldn't have kissed her.
Marguerite Kaye
For a novelist, the gaps in a story are as intriguing as material that still exists.
Sara Sheridan
We ordinary people might lack your great speed or your X-Ray vision, Superman, but never underestimate the power of the human mind. We carry the most dangerous weapon on Earth inside these thick skulls of ours.
Mark Millar
We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.
Alistair MacLean
The seed of every sin known to man is in my heart”.
Robert Murray McCheyne
...That insurgent horror was knit to him closer than a wife, closer than an eye lay caged in his flesh, where he heard it mutter and felt it struggle to be born; and at every hour of weakness, and in the confidence of slumber, prevailed against him, and deposed him out of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
It's asking for trouble to listen to music alone.
Janice Galloway
War is a quarrel between two thieves too cowardly to fight their own battle; therefore they take boys from one village and another village, stick them into uniforms, equip them with guns, and let them loose like wild beasts against one other.
Thomas Carlyle
Happiness ... consists in giving and in serving others.
Henry Drummond
Fear is faithlessness.
George MacDonald
Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.
Hal Duncan
It is perhaps rather fine, after all, being dead. Highly underrated in the modern western world.
Ali Smith
Personally, I’d like to see the word genre taken out back and shot, a bullet in the back of its head, if it’s going to be so overloaded with meanings it’s just gibberish skewed to self-serving doublethink.
Hal Duncan
The tree (of Islam) is of artificial planting. Instead of containing within itself the germ of growth and adaptation to the various requirements of time and clime and circumstance, expanding with the genial sunshine and rain from heaven, it remains the same forced and stunted thing as when first planted some twelve centuries ago.
William Muir
The person who can not bear with a sick man or a baby is not fit to be a woman.
George MacDonald
There is no Thanksgiving back in the old country where I come from. You know why? Because being thankful is a sin.
Craig Ferguson
While what I write is always largely consistent with the records that remain I freely admit that where historical fact proves a barrier to invention, I simply move a detail a little one way or another.
Sara Sheridan
Do you miss wearing your kilt?" she asked.t"In London, it caused more bother than it was worth. Ladies either found it indecent or intriguing. A fair few found it to be both. I was never quite sure whether it was indecently intriguing or intriguingly indecent!
Marguerite Kaye
I'm going to draw up a human-rights contract that says everyone on earth must agree we are here as caretakers of the planet, first and foremost.
Jenni Fagan
Who is there that in logical words can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech which leads us to the edge of the Infinite and lets us for moments gaze into that!
Thomas Carlyle
Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?
Robert Louis Stevenson
My mum always said you get more fun at a Glasgow stabbing than an Edinburgh wedding.
Caro Ramsay
History repeated itself. The 'don't do the things I did' mantra was tiresome pish. The best way to make sure your children don't grow up as cunts is not to be one yourself - or not to let them SEE you being one. This is easier as a sober artist in Santa Barbara than as an alcoholic jailbird in Leith.
Irvine Welsh
The trick, he supposed, was never to lose sight of the theoretical possibility while not for a moment taking the idea remotely seriously.
Iain M. Banks
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!
George MacDonald
Liberty of any kind is never lost all at once.
David Hume
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.
David Hume
Alan," cried I, "what makes ye so good to me? What makes ye care for such a thankless fellow?"Deed, and I don't, know" said Alan. "For just precisely what I thought I liked about ye, was that ye never quarrelled:—and now I like ye better!
Robert Louis Stevenson
You can cover a great deal of country in books.
Andrew Lang
Here hath been dawning another blue day: think wilt thou let it slip useless away?
Thomas Carlyle
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
Adam Smith
We pray pious blether our will is not in it and then we say God does not answer we never asked Him for anything. Asking means that our wills are in what we ask.
Oswald Chambers
An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.
George MacDonald
The greatest thing in all the world is loving. The second greatest in all the world is learning.
George H. Morrison
...she has been bewitched by a wicked sorceress, and will not regain her beauty until she is my wife.''Does she say so? Well if you believe that you may drink cold water and think it bacon'.
Andrew Lang
Any performer tries to perform music as if for the first time, with all that energy and excitement that comes from discovering a new piece--maybe trying to recreate the memory of falling in love with a piece when hearing it first as a child--and just as people regularly say of a brilliant conductor that they seem to conduct as if recreating the energy an audience must have felt when the piece was first played decades, even centuries, before, so too I think we need to communicate our knowledge with the passion we first encountered as children.
Armando Iannucci
Britain wouldn’t have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.
Sara Sheridan
No, sir. I make it a rule of mine: The more it looks like Queer Street, the less I ask.
Robert Louis Stevenson
It is not so true that "prayer changes things" as that prayer changes me and I change things. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of Redemption alters the way in which a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally but of working wonders in a man's disposition.
Oswald Chambers
Dec. 31… “Let the past rest, but let it rest in the sweet embrace of Christ. Leave the broken, irreversible past in His hands, and step out into the invincible future with Him.
Oswald Chambers
I do love America. And LA is a very short commute to America its like half an hour on the plane.
Craig Ferguson
The knowledge of our union with Christ...gives us confidence in prayer. It was when Jesus had begun to expound the closeness of this union that he also began to introduce the disciples to the true heart of prayer. If Christ abides in us and we abide in him, as his word dwells in us, and we pray in his name, that God hears us (Jn 15:4-7). But all of these expressions are simply extensions of the one fundamental idea: If I am united to Christ, then all that is his is mine. So long as my heart, will and mind are one with Christ's in his word, I can approach God with the humble confidence that my prayers will be heard and answered.
Sinclair B. Ferguson