Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 29

You have no future when the past rules you.
Sara Sheridan
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.
Thomas Carlyle
He felt water run down his back from the damp brickwork he was sitting against, and as he worried distantly about corrosion he realised you can always fall a little further. A moment ago he thought he'd bottomed out, but now he was concerned about personal rust. Mother of fuck.
Christopher Brookmyre
The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer but rather what they miss.
Thomas Carlyle
We must lay to, if you please, and keep a bright lookout. It's trying on a man, I know. It would be pleasanter to come to blows. But there's no help for it till we know our men. Lay to, and whistle for a wind, that's my view.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The financial value put on the job of the writer and the misconceptions around that make it extremely difficult to enter the profession.
Sara Sheridan
You cannot run away from a weakness. You must sometimes fight it out or perish and if that be so why not now and where you stand?
Robert Louis Stevenson
We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I remember calling the council's cemetery department to ask about body decomposition in different soil types. Once they had verified that I was a novelist and not a sicko, they were extremely helpful.
Sara Sheridan
...the greatest barrier to intimacy is fear -- fear of being known, fear of being rejected, fear of facing the truth about ourselves......We are afraid to be known because at some deep level we fear that the truth about us, when out in the open and reflected back to us through someone else's eyes, will be shocking to ourselves.
Sheila Walsh
I prefer the pen. There is something elemental about the glide and flow of nib and ink on paper.
James Robertson
Afternoon drinkers shifted in the gloom as if they sensed new blood.
Sara Sheridan
Faith is a total attitude of the self.
John Macquarrie
Losing maturity in one’s fiction for the sake of marvels and monsters can also mean losing propriety, and that’s not always a bad thing.
Hal Duncan
He that can work is a born king of something.
Thomas Carlyle
Brave old world.
Ali Smith
Time is the silent never-resting thing ... rolling rushing on swift silent like an all-embracing oceantide on which we and all the universe swim.
Thomas Carlyle
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
John Witherspoon
When the first book out my sister-in-law read it and we were chatting at 5 o'clock in the afternoon and she said, "Oh my God, chapter six, sex and a murder," and her five year old wandered into the kitchen and said, "Sixty hamburgers?
Sara Sheridan
Come to the woods, for here is rest. There is no repose like that of the green deep woods. Sleep in forgetfulness of all ill.
John Muir
I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.
Craig Ferguson
Stick in and do my best.
Rhona Cameron
[Men] are incomprehensible animals... They walk about boasting of their wisdom, strength, and sovereignty, while they have not sense so much as to swallow an apple with the aid of an Eve to put it down their throats.
Frances Wright
The wolf was sick he vowed a monk to be - But when he got well a wolf once more was he.
Walter Bower
...I believe that doubts, honestly expressed and wrestled with, produce a faith that is stronger and more intimate than doubts suppressed under the veneer of faith.
Sheila Walsh
Mrs Beaumont shrugged. ‘Dougie travelled light in life,’ she said. ‘He knew it was people who were important.
Sara Sheridan
Escapers were the cream of the crop.
Sara Sheridan
I didn't flee a dictator or swim an ocean to be an American like some do. I just thought long and hard about it.
Craig Ferguson
Individual humans are not super, but the organism of which we are all tiny cellular parts is most certainly that. The life-form that's so big we forget it's there, that turns minerals on its planet into tools to touch the infinite black gap between stars or probe the obliterating pressures at the bottom of the oceans. We are already part of a superbeing, a monster, a god, a living process that is so all encompassing that it is to an individual life what water is to a fish. We are cells in the body of a three-billion-year-old life-form whose roots are in the Precambrian oceans and whose genetic wiring extends through the living structures of everything on the planet, connecting everything that has ever lived in one immense nervous system.
Grant Morrison
Everyone lives by selling something.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.
Sara Sheridan
He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper but he is more excellent who suits his temper to any circumstances.
David Hume
He who makes his needs known to God gains for immediate answer "the peace of God which passeth understanding," and can wait God’s time for the rest.
Alexander MacLaren
Dark haired guys are so, so much better.
Estelle Maskame
Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea.
George MacDonald
The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The moment one definitely commits oneself then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred. A stream of events issues from the decision raising unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.
W.H.Murray
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief in great men.
Thomas Carlyle
Human nature is seldom at a loss to find or create an excuse for pursuing the predominant bias of inclination.
Helen Craik
Atheists determine there is no God based on their own intellect. I've determined there is a God based on His intellect.
William Branks
He picked up the hairbrush and handed it to her. "What were you planning to do with that, comb me to death?
Marguerite Kaye
He`s quite extraordinary with his moves and spins. I think he was a baton girl in a past life [on his co-star Hayden Christensen].
Ewan McGregor
There are instances, indeed, wherein men shew a vanity in resembling a great man in his countenance, shape, air, or other minute circumstances, that contribute not in any degree to his reputation; but it must be confess’d, that this extends not very far, nor is of any considerable moment in these affections. For this I assign the following reason. We can never have a vanity of resembling in trifles any person, unless he be possess’d of very shining qualities, which give us a respect and veneration for him. These qualities, then, are, properly speaking, the causes of our vanity, by means of their relation to ourselves. Now after what manner are they related to ourselves? They are parts of the person we value, and consequently connected with these trifles; which are also suppos’d to be parts of him. These trifles are connected with the resembling qualities in us; and these qualities in us, being parts, are connected with the whole; and by that means form a chain of several links betwixt ourselves and the shining qualities of the person we resemble. But besides that this multitude of relations must weaken the connexion; ’tis evident the mind, in passing from the shining qualities to the trivial ones, must by that contrast the better perceive the minuteness of the latter, and be in some measure asham’d of the comparison and resemblance.
David Hume
What the best novels and novelists do is to offer a different way of seeing.
Aminatta Forna
A man who has cured himself of all ridiculous prepossessions, and is fully, sincerely, and steadily convinced, from experience as well as philosophy, that the difference of fortune makes less difference in happiness than is vulgarly imagined; such a one does not measure out degrees of esteem according to the rent-rolls of his acquaintance. He may, indeed, externally pay a superior deference to the great lord above the vassal; because riches are the most convenient, being the most fixed and determinate, source of distinction. But his internal sentiments are more regulated by the personal characters of men, than by the accidental and capricious favours of fortune.
David Hume
A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.
Sara Sheridan
The Christians had an almost miraculous talent for turning wine into water.
Ken MacLeod
They should be taking bonuses from bankers, not library books from schoolchildren. What kind of society are we building?
Sara Sheridan
You've got nothing to be worried about," he whispers slowly, his breath hot against my cheek, "because, baby, I'm all yours.
Estelle Maskame
That's all nonsense," said Curdie. "I don't know what you mean." "Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense?
George MacDonald
An intelligence completely dissociated from the physical, or at least an impression of it, was a strange, curiously limited and almost perverse thing, and the precise form that your physicality took had a profound, in some ways defining influence on your personality.
Iain M. Banks
The introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.
Alasdair MacIntyre
Writing about the 1950s has given me tremendous respect for my mother's generation.
Sara Sheridan
(Quoted by Thomas Carlyle) The rude man requires only to see something going on. The man of more refinement must be made to feel. The man of complete refinement must be made to reflect.
Thomas Carlyle
The best things are nearest: breath in your nostrils light in your eyes flowers at your feet duties at your hand the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars but do life's plain common work as it comes certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Nothing truly wild is unclean.
John Muir
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.
Adam Smith
Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.
William Barclay
...People - the ones who are left behind - desire answers. Even when we are advised from beyond the grave not to pursue them.
Marguerite Kaye
Love is ever the beginning of Knowledge as fire is of light.
Thomas Carlyle