Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 23

Blessed is he who has found his work let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work a life-purpose. ... Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is. ... Even in the meanest sorts of labor the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work.
Thomas Carlyle
But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed.
Andrew Lang
My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.
Sara Sheridan
A heartless Christian must be a terrible grief to our Lord.
Oswald Chambers
Everything was a metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city and his mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been cut, but within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things were like other things, was like...like...he found it hard to think of a comparison. A magic mirror, maybe.
Iain M. Banks
Do you really suppose God cares whether a man comes to good or ill?""If He did not, He could not be good himself...""...Then He can't be so hard on us as the parsons say, even in the after-life?""He will give absolute justice, which is the only good thing. He will spare nothing to bring His children back to himself, their sole well-being, whether He achieve it here--or there.
George MacDonald
Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived.Anarchy in black.
Mark Millar
I am in love-desire, and unless you take me now, I shall fall in pieces...but I do not think I can be moderate. Forgive me, forgive me...'But her breathing was as changed now as his, and all order retreating before the strength of the living force beating about them. She pressed the latch, and set the last door to lie open.'Khush geldi: welcome: thou art come happily,' she said gently, and let him come, where he belonged, within her gouvernance.
Dorothy Dunnett
Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.
Sara Sheridan
Emotion is not simply an overplus of feeling; it is life lived at white-heat, a state of wonder. To lose wonder is to lose the true element of religion.
Oswald Chambers
So I sang out the barbarous words - karaoke from Hell.
Grant Morrison
When a man is at his wits' end it is not a cowardly thing to pray it is the only way he can get in touch with Reality.
Oswald Chambers
I fear nothing when I am doing right,' said Jack.'Then,' said the lady in the red cap, 'you are one of those who slay giants.
Andrew Lang
...[T]wo of you can be no match for the three giants, I will find you, if I can, a third brother, who will take on himself the third share of the fight, and the preparation...I will show him to you in a glass, and, when he comes, you will know him at once. If he will share your endeavors, you must teach him all you know, and he will repay you well, in present song, and in future deeds.'She opened the door of a curious old cabinet that stood in the room. On the inside of this door was an oval convex mirror...we at length saw reflected the place where we stood, and the old dame seated in her chair...at the feet of the dame lay a young man...weeping.'Surely this youth will not serve our ends,' said I, 'for he weeps.'The old woman smiled. 'Past tears are present strength,'said she.
George MacDonald
I'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade.
Sara Sheridan
– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café.The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.
Hal Duncan
Spring work is going on with joyful enthusiasm.
John Muir
I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow. Not being able to accept that you're just this collection of cells, intelligent to whatever degree, capable of feeling emotion to whatever degree, for a limited amount of time and so on, on this tiny little rock orbiting this not particularly important sun in one of just 400m galaxies, and whatever other levels of reality there might be via something like brane-theory [of multiple dimensions] … really, it's not about you. It's what religion does with this drive for acknowledgement of self-importance that really gets up my nose. 'Yeah, yeah, your individual consciousness is so important to the universe that it must be preserved at all costs' – oh, please. Do try to get a grip of something other than your self-obsession. How Californian. The idea that at all costs, no matter what, it always has to be all about you. Well, I think not.
Iain M. Banks
When suicide is out of fashion we conclude that none but madmen destroy themselves; and all the efforts of courage appear chimerical to dastardly minds ... Nevertheless, how many instances are there, well attested, of men, in every other respect perfectly discreet, who, without remorse, rage, or despair, have quitted life for no other reason than because it was a burden to them, and have died with more composure than they lived?
David Hume
Gin a body meets a body Comin' through the rye. Gin a body kiss a body Need a body cry?
James Drummond Burns
As we draw on the grace of God He increases voluntary poverty all along the line. Always give the best you have got every time; never think about who you are giving it to; let other people take it or leave it as they choose. Pour out the best you have, and always be poor. Never reserve anything; never be diplomatic and careful about the treasure God gives.
Oswald Chambers
A city is more than a place in space, it is a drama in time
Patrick Geddes
You might, without my crediting it, fall deeply in love and forever, with some warped hunchback whelped in the gutter. I should equally stop you from taking him.
Dorothy Dunnett
Hero-worship exists has existed and will forever exist universally among mankind.
Thomas Carlyle
We act like pagans in a crisis--only one out of an entire crowd is daring enough to invest his faith in the character of God.
Oswald Chambers
Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality.
John Muir
We'll get there!
Ewan McGregor
What was it that marked me as a woman and was I prepared to let it go?
Sara Sheridan
Awake, my soul! Why should I give hours and days any longer to the vain world, when there is such a world of misery at my very door? Lord, put thine own strength in me; confirm every good resolution; forgive my past long life of uselessness and folly.
Andrew Bonar
I have become very aware how under-represented are the stories of the underprivileged and undervalued. Our records are, in general, very male and if not always the material of the rich, certainly (for obvious reasons) the material of the literate.
Sara Sheridan
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Robert Burns
Being a writer is a more difficult job than people imagine.
Sara Sheridan
It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Faith is deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.
Oswald Chambers
All war will end when women cease to find men in uniforms attractive - discuss.
Bill Drummond
Oh! Why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a swift-fleeing meteor a fast flying cloud A flash of the lightning a break of the wave Man passes from life to his rest in the grave.
William Knox
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.
Robert Louis Stevenson
[I]t would be a niceness that was enforced leniently, patiently and gracefully, with the sort of unflappable self-certainty [they] couldn't help displaying when all its statistics proved that it really was doing the right thing.
Iain M. Banks
Anyone who's just driven 90 yards against huge men trying to kill them has earned the right to do Jazz hands.
Craig Ferguson
Do nothing, and nothing happens. Life is about decisions. You either make them or they're made for you, but you can't avoid them.
Mhairi McFarlane
A fair day's wages for a fair day's work: it is as just a demand as governed men ever made of government.
Thomas Carlyle
Clearly the secret of happiness...is a variation on the general principle of banging your head against a wall, and then stopping.
Stef Penney
It is of no use mincing the matter; Dr John Marsh, after being regarded by his friends at home as hopelessly unimpressible—in short, an absolute woman-hater—had found his fate on a desolate isle of the Southern seas, he had fallen—nay, let us be just—had jumped over head and ears in love with Pauline Rigonda! Dr Marsh was no sentimental die-away noodle who, half-ashamed, half-proud of his condition, displays it to the semi-contemptuous world. No; after disbelieving for many years in the power of woman to subdue him, he suddenly and manfully gave in—sprang up high into the air, spiritually, and so to speak, turning a sharp somersault, went headlong down deep into the flood, without the slightest intention of ever again returning to the surface.
R.M. Ballantyne
Oh, I can picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on, singing along to ZZ Top's 'Sharp Dressed Man' or the opening line from 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf - 'Get your motor running...' The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget Viagra, get yourself a trike!
Billy Connolly
Words is but wind but dunts is the devil
Dorothy Dunnett
God's silences are His answers. If we only take as answers those that are visible to our senses we are in a very elementary condition of grace.
Oswald Chambers
Gillman smiles, in the cold manner of an assassin. It's like looking in the mirror.
Irvine Welsh
Plato in both the Gorgias and the Republic looked back to Socrates and asserted that "it is better to suffer tortures on the rack than to have a soul burdened with the guilt of doing evil." Aristotle does not confront this position directly: he merely emphasizes that it is better still both to be free from having done evil and to be free from being tortured on the rack.
Alasdair MacIntyre
I know it all, and I still love you." That is the convicting, convincing, liberating truth that comes from an encounter with Christ: all is known; there is no need to pretend anymore. I wrestled with that truth. It's hard to lay aside a mask when it looks just like you, and you have worn it for so long that you can't remember what you look like without it.
Sheila Walsh
Marriage is one long conversation checkered by disputes.
Robert Louis Stevenson
...a guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you among its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some of its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximize that effect, and some try to minimize it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former. Prevarication will be more difficult than you might imagine; neutrality is probably impossible. You cannot choose not to have the politics you do; they are not some separate set of entities somehow detachable from the rest of your being; they are a function of your existence. I know that and they know that; you had better accept it.
Iain M. Banks
It is energy the central element of which is will that produces the miracles of enthusiasm in all ages. It is the mainspring of what is called force of character and the sustaining power of all great action.
Samuel Smiles
I like a highland friend who will stand by me not only when I am in the right but when I am a little in the wrong.
Sir Walter Scott
Conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a man. It is the threshold of an understanding of God. Jesus Christ said that when the Holy Spirit came He would convict of sin, and when the Holy Spirit rouses the conscience and brings him into the presence of God, it is not his relationship with men that bothers him, but his relationship with God.
Oswald Chambers
I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?
Robert Louis Stevenson
At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In a mounting panic the samnite hefted his rifle and delivered a blast straight to Skullhammer's chest, point blank. Once again, torment and debilitation failed to ensue. 'Well, this is awkward,' said Juno.
Christopher Brookmyre
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
Adam Smith
Long, blue, spiky-edged shadows crept out across the snow-fields, while a rosy glow, at first scarce discernible, gradually deepened and suffused every mountain-top, flushing the glaciers and the harsh crags above them. This was the alpenglow, to me the most impressive of all the terrestrial manifestations of God. At the touch of this divine light, the mountains seemed to kindle to a rapt, religious consciousness, and stood hushed like devout worshippers waiting to be blessed.
John Muir
These hapless livers were probably not always mere myths, and these legends which traced their spilt blood in the purple bloom of the violet, the scarlet stain of the anemone, or the crimson flush or the rose were no idle poetic emblem of youth and beauty fleeting as the Summer flowers.
Sir George James Frazer