Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 32

[S]how yourself a Christian, by suffering without murmuring; - in patience possess your soul: they lose nothing who gain Christ.
Samuel Rutherford
I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.
George MacDonald
...let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.
Oswald Chambers
Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity,
Robert Louis Stevenson
Time is only linear for engineers and referees.
Craig Ferguson
Service is the overflow which pours from a life filled with love and devotion.
Oswald Chambers
Beware of surrender that is motivated by personal benefits that may result.
Oswald Chambers
Prayer is often a temptation to bank on a miracle of God instead of on a moral issue i.e. it is much easier to ask God to do my work than it is to do it myself. Until we are disciplined properly we will always be inclined to bank on God's miracles and refuse to do the moral thing ourselves. It is our job and it will never be done unless we do it.
Oswald Chambers
Everybody seemed to like Skype except him, Tony thought, closing his office door then settling in front of his screen. His dislike was both personal and professional. Everybody looked weird on Skype. Everyone, frankly, looked like a potential patient. There was something very unsettling about that fish-eyed stare. Even people he liked looked deranged. From a professional perspective, the trouble was you could never see enough of the person you were in conversation with to gauge their body language. They might be giving off all sort of signals you’d be aware of in what his boss had taken to calling “F2F encounters,” but the Skype interface could hide a multitude of clues.
Val McDermid
Those who have not been stung will hardly fear a bee the same as those who have.
Sara Sheridan
Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit down, she frequently found herself thinking.
Sara Sheridan
There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the
Iain M. Banks
He will know from and early age that failure is not disgrace. It's just a pitch that you missed, and you'd better get ready for the next one. The next one might be the shot heard round the world. My son and I are Americans, we prepare for glory by failing until we don't.
Craig Ferguson
All the real blokes I know are obsessed with cars and have started doing cycling at the weekend and being really, really boring about it and banging on about their Fitbits and growing stupid beards and talking about being on Tinder. That's what all the 'real men' are like these days!
Jenny Colgan
She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.
Alistair MacLean
Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initative or creation, there is one elementary truth...that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves. too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would otherwise never have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in ones's favor all manner of incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have believed would have come his way. Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace, and power in it.
W.H.Murray
The human race has been set up. Someone somewhere is playing a practical joke on us. Apparently women need to feel loved to have sex. Men need to have sex to feel loved. How do we ever get started?
Billy Connolly
To be what we are and to become what we are capable of becoming is the only end of life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Christ wrought out His perfect obedience as a man, through temptation, and by suffering.
Alexander MacLaren
love is the only fire that is hot enough to melt the iron obstinacy of a creatures will
Alexander MacLaren
[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.
Iain M. Banks
They say that even of a good thing you can have too much. But I doubt it. True, such good things as sunbathing, beer, and tobacco may be intemperately pursued to the detriment of their devotees; yet, to my mind, one cannot have too much of a good murder.
William Roughead
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
John Muir
I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it's my ambition to create something compelling - something unputdownable and riveting - that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.
Sara Sheridan
How old are you?""Ten," answered Tangle."You don't look like it," said the lady."How old are you, please?" returned Tangle."Thousands of years old," answered the lady."You don't look like it," said Tangle."Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am!
George MacDonald
It’s not until you’re older that you realise how important the things that happened to you when you were a kid are. Even things you only half remember.
Sara Sheridan
Being me is a job — is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn’t something people give away and then there’s drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That’s a full-time occupation: that’s like being a miner, or a nurse.
A.L. Kennedy
The Jock Upstart, is what Wellington calls - called me. A man who does not know his allotted place in the scheme of things.
Marguerite Kaye
The sky was a sparkling succession of black diamonds on black velvet made crystal clear by the blackout.
Sara Sheridan
... something wholly new in religious thought. All other heavens have been gardens, dreamlands: passivities, more or less aimless. Even to the majority among ourselves, heaven is a siesta and not a city.The heaven of Christianity is different from all other heavens, because the religion of Christianity is different from all other religions. Christianity is the religion of cities. It moves among real things. Its sphere is the street, the market-place, the working life of the world... Try to restore the natural force of the expression - suppose John to have lived today and to have said 'I saw a new London.
Henry Drummond
Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
You will never find Jesus so precious, as when the world is one vast howling wilderness. Then He is like a rose blooming in the midst of the desolation, or a rock rising above the storm! Do not set your hearts on any of the flowers of this world. They shall all fade and die. Prize the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley. Jesus never changes! Live nearer to Christ than to any person on this earth; so that when they are taken away, you may have Him to love and lean upon. “Yes, He is altogether lovely. This is my Beloved, and this is my Friend!” (Song of Solomon 5:16)
Robert Murray McCheyne
Some things belong to the past.
Ronald Frame
Believe me. Everything is meant.
Ali Smith
I had never really understood what an adventure life could be, if you followed your heart and did what you really wanted to do, which is what we must all do in the end.
Sara Sheridan
There is no happiness in having or in getting but only in giving.
Henry Drummond
How delicious is the winning of a kiss at love's beginning.
Thomas Campbell
Ah'm thinking about shoutin 'stop' but ah could never turn away at this point. If smack is as addictive as they say, then ah'm already aw the junky ah'm ever gaunny be.
Irvine Welsh
All work of man is as the swimmer's: a vast ocean threatens to devour him if he front it not bravely it will keep its word.
Thomas Carlyle
There is endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done.
Thomas Carlyle
As she stepped into the steamboat at Dover which was to convey her to scenes so new, Lucilla felt more and more that she who held the reorganisation of society in Carlingford in her hands was a woman with a mission.
Mrs. Oliphant
Vanity dies hard, in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I think commercialism helps Christmas and I think that the more capitalism we can inject into the Christmas holiday the more spiritual I feel about it
Craig Ferguson
[I]t must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook.
David Hume
A new Member requires the experience of his first session in the House to teach him how to hang up his overcoat and take his seat in a manner befitting a gentlemen.
John A. Macdonald
For others, as for ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly understand anything, that would be enough to prove it undivine; and that which is but one step beyond our understanding must be in some of its relations as mysterious as if it were a hundred.
George MacDonald
Every man's road in life is marked by the graves of his personal likings.
Alexander Smith
Immense power is acquired by assuring yourself in your secret reveries that you were born to control affairs.
Andrew Carnegie
Some folks are wise and some are otherwise.
Tobias Smollett
Remorse (I did it) is an easy, passive, human reaction, there is no value in it and it changes nothing. Repentance (I will not do it again) is the difficult call to action in a redeemed heart. It has an eternal impact and it can change everything.
William Branks
Faith is the proper name of religious experience.
John Baillie
Whenever the insistence is on the point that God answers prayer we are off the track. The meaning of prayer is that we get hold of God not of the answer.
Oswald Chambers
Today women have the rights and equality our Victorian sisters could only dream of, and with those privileges comes the responsibility of standing up and being counted.
Sara Sheridan
The prudent man is always sincere, and feels horror at the very thought of exposing himself to the disgrace which attends upon the detection of falsehood. But though always sincere, he is not always frank and open; and though he never tells any thing but the truth, he does not always think himself bound, when not properly called upon, to tell the whole truth. As he is cautious in his actions, so he is reserved in his speech; and never rashly or unnecessarily obtrudes his opinion concerning either things or persons.
Adam Smith
Where did you come from baby dear? Out of the Everywhere into here.
George MacDonald
She was herself in their company but a very specific version of herself.
Sara Sheridan
It's hard to sleep when you have thirty two million quids worth of stolen jewellery hidden under the mattress.
Peter Houston
It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on one’s judgement.
Sara Sheridan
I don’t think being a comedian gives you any fucking insight into what makes people laugh.
Craig Ferguson
No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.
George MacDonald