Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 25

As a historical novelist, there is very little I like more than spending time sorting through boxes of old letters, diaries, maps, trinkets, and baubles.
Sara Sheridan
Ah, there," said Morgan, "that comed of sp'iling Bibles.""That comes--as you call it--of being arrant asses," retorted the doctor.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.
Sara Sheridan
Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain - eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain's own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is - if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function - so much the more is the mountain's integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.
Nan Shepherd
Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven't touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.
Craig Ferguson
Many of us do not continue to grow spiritually because we prefer to choose on the basis of our rights, instead of relying on God to make the choice for us.
Oswald Chambers
There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind.
George MacDonald
There is but one art to omit.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news
John Muir
O, lack and doubt and fear can only comeBecause of plenty, confidence, and love!They are the shadow-forms about their feet,Because they are not perfect crystal-clearTo the all-searching sun in which they live.Dread of its loss is Beauty’s certain seal!
George MacDonald
When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God’s throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.
Oswald Chambers
I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.
Alasdair Gray
A good conscience is eight parts of courage.
Robert Louis Stevenson
It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless—he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.
George MacDonald
To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.
Alasdair MacIntyre
The Maestro spoke again. "When we are not, at what point do we become?" I could not reply. For I had grasped no shape of his thoughts. I understood neither what he said nor his intent behind it.
Theresa Breslin
This social worker lassie turns round n gies us a stroppy look. Ah jist smiles bit she looked away aw fuckin nippy likes. Disnae cost nowt tae be social. A social worker thit cannae be fuckin social; that's nae good tae nae cunt, thon. Like a lifeguard thit cannae fuckin swim. Shouldnae be daein that kinday joab.
Irvine Welsh
True love's the gift which God has given To man alone beneath the heaven: It is not fantasy's hot fire Whose wishes soon as granted fly It liveth not in fierce desire.
Sir Walter Scott
Such a night cannot be shaken from a woman’s memory. Such a night changes your life forever.
Sara Sheridan
Self-preservation is not a man’s first duty: flight is his last. Better and wiser and infinitely nobler to stand a mark for the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and to stop at our post though we fall there, better infinitely to toil on, even when toil seems vain, than cowardly to keep a whole skin at the cost of a wounded conscience or despairingly to fling up work, because the ground is hard and the growth of the seed imperceptible. Prudent advices, when the prudence is only inspired by sense, are generally foolish.
Alexander MacLaren
Bit it's what bein a hard man is aw aboot; its a journey, a fucking self destructive quest tae find yir limits, cause they fuckin limits eywis come in the form ay a harder man. A big. strong, stiff hard man whae can dae it for ye, whae can teach ye, show ye whaire ye stand, where yir fuckin parameters ur.
Irvine Welsh
People who care nothing for their country's stories and songs,' he said, 'are like people without a past- without a memory- they are half people
Alasdair Gray
There is an old saying, that in the desert a camel is more useful than a kingdom," he said ruefully, "but as a location for lovemaking, it leaves a lot to be desired.
Marguerite Kaye
During the war some of the country’s sharpest minds had looked as if they had been dragged through a hedge backwards.
Sara Sheridan
In the beginning said a Persian poet - Allah took a rose a lily a dove a serpent a little honey a Dead Sea apple and a handful of clay. When he looked at the amalgram - it was a woman.
William Sharp
We are a race prone to monsters, she thought, and when we produce one we worship it.
Iain M. Banks
Politeness goes far yet costs nothing.
Samuel Smiles
Once they have dedicated themselves to a cause, women will fight to the end for it.
Sara Sheridan
The Gospel is not a mere message of deliverance, but a canon of conduct; it is not a theology to be accepted, but it is ethics to be lived. It is not to be believed only, but it is to be taken into life as a guide.
Alexander MacLaren
I am a beast until I love as God doth love.
George MacDonald
No one provokes me with impunity (nemo me impune lacessit)
Motto of Scotland
The tears of Christ are the pity of God. The gentleness of Jesus is the long-suffering of God. The tenderness of Jesus is the love of God. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.
Alexander MacLaren
The touchstone of the Holy Spirit’s work in us is the answer to our Lord’s question: “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” Our Lord makes human destiny depend on that one thing, Who men say He is, because the revelation of Who Jesus is is only given by the Holy Spirit.
Oswald Chambers
One life - a little gleam of Time between two Eternities.
Thomas Carlyle
it had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.
Iain M. Banks
A society gets the criminals it deserves.
Val McDermid
I was driven to reflect deeply and inveterately on that hard law of life, which lies at the root of religion and is one of the most plentiful springs of distress. Though so profound a double-dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I laboured, in the eye of day, at the futherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I do not think the division of the subject into two parts - into applied mathematics and experimental physics a good one, for natural philosophy without experiment is merely mathematical exercise, while experiment without mathematics will neither sufficiently discipline the mind or sufficiently extend our knowledge in a subject like physics.
Balfour Stewart
All prejudice presents itself as piety, propriety.
Hal Duncan
No enthusiasm will ever stand the strain that Jesus Christ will put upon His worker, only one thing will, and that is a personal relationship to Himself which has gone through the mill of His spring-cleaning until there is only one purpose left--I am here for God to send me where He will.
Oswald Chambers
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh.” The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game.
Iain M. Banks
But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope,That one day we shall thank thee perfectlyFor pain and hope and all that led or droveUs back into the bosom of thy love.
George MacDonald
take your best orgasm, multiply the feeling by twenty, and you're still fuckin miles off the pace
Irvine Welsh
Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful than even _to do_. Action _may_ be hypocrisy, but being is the thing itself, and is the parent of action.
George MacDonald
For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
Robert Louis Stevenson
When God brings a time of waiting, and appears to be unresponsive, don't fill it with busyness, just wait.
Oswald Chambers
I wish to be buried in Ireland, the country of my adoption a country which I loved, which I have dutifully served, and for which I believe I have sacrificed my life.
Thomas Drummond
Only one in a thousand sits down in the midst of it all and says—I will watch my Father mend this. God must not be treated as a hospital for our broken “toys,” but as our Father.
Oswald Chambers
It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.
James Boswell
When you least expect it, you run in to an old friend from school, or the neighbour’s cat, not Mary the Virgin Mother of God.
Margot McCuaig
Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy.
Thomas Carlyle
That is the way with all of your kind… It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strain survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.
Iain M. Banks
I'm not sure how much easier it is for a mother to balance her life now - have we simply swapped one set of restrictions for another?
Sara Sheridan
A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.
Thomas Carlyle
It is impossible to conduct your life as a disciple without definite times of secret prayer.
Oswald Chambers
O, wad some Power the giftie gie usTo see oursels as others see us!It wad frae monie a blunder free us,An' foolish notion.
Robert Burns
Young men, especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend “a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.
Andrew Lang
One of Scotland's most important cultural exports - stories.
Sara Sheridan
A good roast of sun, it slows you, lets you relax–and out here if there's anything wrong, you can see it coming with bags of time to do what's next. This is the place and the weather for peace, for the cultivation of a friendly mind.
A.L. Kennedy
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