Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 33

I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.
Thomas Carlyle
Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.
Jenny Colgan
Every man dies. Not every man really lives.
William Wallace
Once you’re on the pleasure express, it’s hard to get off and switch to another, slower service.
Sara Sheridan
Often we don't notice the stringent rules to which our culture subjects us.
Sara Sheridan
The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose aiming at something outside self.
Hugh Black
The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.
Adam Smith
As a matter of fact I did flirt with Socialism, in my youth.""That when you were in university, was it?"He smiled. "Yes. University. But then I saw how much more comfortable life could be as one of the exploiters rather than one of the exploited. Plus I decided that if the proles were so stupid as to let themselves be exploited, who was I to stand in their way?
Iain M. Banks
Prayer is the evidence that I am spiritually concentrated on God.
Oswald Chambers
There is nothing more effective in igniting a man's desire than a woman's passion. To see the fire in your eyes, to feel the fire in your blood as you touch me, it sets me on fire too. Do you imagine I would prefer to kiss a woman who responds only with -- with compliance? No, I would not. No red-blooded man would. Never apologize for passion. Restraint, Julia, has no place in lovemaking.
Marguerite Kaye
Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals.
Iain M. Banks
If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction.
George MacDonald
I never weary of great churches. It is my favourite kind of mountain scenery. Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Who can give a man this, his own name?
George MacDonald
REQUIEMUnder the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he long'd to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
Robert Louis Stevenson
Never look for justice in this world, never cease to give it.
Oswald Chambers
Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.Join the Rat Race "just for a while."Concentrate on your career "just for a while."Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while.
Christopher Brookmyre
We promised we'd all stay in touch. Even joked about a yearly reunion. These kinds of goodbyes are the scary goodbyes. The goodbyes where you know the chances of seeing each other again are very slim.
Estelle Maskame
A man who is born to be hanged can never be drowned.
Marguerite Kaye
Should auld acquaintances be forgot And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot And days o'auld lang syne?
James Drummond Burns
...never act on the impulse of that feeling. If you do, you will cause difficult situations to arise which will take years to untangle. Wait for God's timing and He will do it without any heartache or disappointment.
Oswald Chambers
I wondered if that was what I was doing myself – caring so much about something that was so long gone that I was only propping it up.
Sara Sheridan
Debt is a bottomless sea.
Thomas Carlyle
I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me... they were gone for ever.
James Robertson
Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.
Nan Shepherd
Can you taste it Bruce? Can you taste the filth, the dirt, the oily blackness of that fossil fuel in our mouth as you choke and gag and spit it out? Do you still hear his voice in your head urging you to eat? Eat, eat eat. Your mother's cries. Do you hear them? You should be Bruce. Because I know that it's never left you alone. Now you can eat what you want to eat. For me, for you, for all the others. Now you can consume to your heart's content or your soul's destruction, whichever comes first. So eat.
Irvine Welsh
Property has its duties as well as its rights.
William Drummond
It's luck. All is luck when skill's played out. It was luck left me with a face that didn't fit in Contact, it's luck that's made you a great game-player, it's luck that's put you here tonight. Neither of us were fully planned, Jernau Gurgeh; your genes determined you and your mother's genofixing made certain you would not be a cripple or mentally subnormal. The rest is chance. I was brought into being with the freedom to be myself; if what that general plan and that particular luck produced is something a majority — a majority, mark you; not all — of one SC admissions board decides is not what they just happen to want, is it my fault? Is it?""No," Gurgeh sighed, looking down."Oh, it's all so wonderful in the Culture, isn't it, Gurgeh; nobody starves and nobody dies of disease or natural disasters and nobody and nothing's exploited, but there's still luck and heartache and joy, there's still chance and advantage and disadvantage.
Iain M. Banks
To be surrendered to God is of more value than our personal holiness.
Oswald Chambers
I think when you become a parent you go from being a star in the movie of your own life to the supporting player in the movie of someone else's.
Craig Ferguson
Life is worth living and no matter what it throws at you it is important to keep your eyes on the prize of the happiness that will come. Even when the Death Railway reduced us to little more than animals, humanity in the shape of our saintly medical officers triumphed over barbarism.Remember, while it always seems darkest before the dawn, perseverance pays off and the good times will return.
Alistair Urquhart
This investigation felt difficult, like driving in fog.
Sara Sheridan
It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state...
James Clerk Maxwell
he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Fear is the strong passion; it is with fear that you must trifle, if you wish to taste the intensest joys of living.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I think the easiest people to fool are ourselves. Fooling ourselves may even be a necessary precondition for fooling others.
Iain Banks
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the path of the weak becomes a stepping stone in the path of the strong.
Thomas Carlyle
Crime writers, I've noticed, can be jumpy. They live in a world where there are murderers on the loose and they haven't been caught yet!
Sara Sheridan
All that Mankind has done, thought, gained or been is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of Books. They are the chosen possession of men.
Thomas Carlyle
May in Varanasi. 25° and wet. It's like the 6th circle of the inferno here, Edith - where they flail the arses off the howling heretics and the men who fuck marine life etc. NATO's stomping on the Balkans while India and Pakistan threaten one another with nukes. "Dead From the Waist Down" on MTV. The humidity's making me horny and mad. I miss Robin. In his new book, Ken Wilbur calls it "skin hunger". I feel like I'm building up a charge. Monsoon's on its way.
Grant Morrison
And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.
Ali Smith
The ability to overcome failure--to live through it and move on--is crucial. If we are not willing to face failure--if we don't have the skills to survive it--we have precluded any real creativity or risk. Failure may never become our friend, but if we are to do meaningful work, perhaps failure needs to be our companion.
John Hunter
John Muir, Earth — planet, Un
John Muir
Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, I'll sing theea song in thy praise;My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dream.Thou stock dove whose echoresounds thro' the glen,Ye wild whistly blackbirdsin yon thorny den,Thou green crested lapwingthy screaming forbear,I charge you, disturb notmy slumbering fair.How lofty, sweet Afton,thy neighboring hills,Far mark'd with the coursesof clear winding rills;There daily I wanderas noon rises high,My flocks and my Mary'ssweet cot in my eye.How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, Where, wild in the woodlands,the primroses blow;There oft, as mild eveningweeps over the lea,The sweet-scented birk shadesmy Mary and me.Thy crystal stream, Afton,how lovely it glides,And winds by the cot wheremy Mary resides;How wanton thy watersher snowy feet lave,As, gathering sweet flowerets,she stems thy clear wave.Flow gently, sweet Afton,amang thy green braes,Flow gently, sweet river,the theme of my lays; My Mary's asleepby thy murmuring stream,Flow gently, sweet Afton,disturb not her dreams.
Robert Burns
I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.
Craig Ferguson
I've got mixed feelings about poetry cause done well poetry is fantastic. But not many people are capable of doing it well. I think you should have some kind of license to perform poetry. A poetic license perhaps.
Craig Ferguson
This is the cusp of an age at least as exciting and as brimful of potential as the early days of the printing press.
Sara Sheridan
To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.
George MacDonald
But I find it necessary to repeat in this particular place that the division into classes, which is so salient a part of modern demonology, had, and has, little significance for primitive man or for the peasant in a comparatively low state of mental development. To such people, spirits of all kinds - fairies, the ghosts of the dead, and even witches and water-kelpies - are all creatures of the supernatural class between which he scarcely differentiates.
Lewis Spence
This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!
John Muir
She still cared for me, and the best way I could make amends to her was to be happy.I do have a knack for finding great women.
Craig Ferguson
The testimony of scripture is so plain that to add anything were superfluous, were it not that the world is almost now come to that blindness, that whatsoever pleases not the princes and the multitude, the same is rejected as doctrine newly forged, and is condemned for heresy.
John Knox
Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.
Alasdair Gray
We can only be used by God after we allow Him to show us the deep, hidden areas of our own character.
Oswald Chambers
Self under self, a pile of selves I standThreaded on time, and with metaphysic handLift the farm like a lid and seeFarm within farm, and in the centre, me.
Norman MacCaig
It seems supernatural, but only because it is not understood.
John Muir
You’re young, and like anything new. It’s change you want. I’m middle-aged, and there’s nothing staler to me than change. Constant comfort and little luxuries as regular as the clock are fresher than change.
John Davidson
Time is the empty space that allows knowledge—let alone wisdom—to grow.
John Hunter
Epicurus's old questions are still unanswered: Is he (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? then whence evil?
David Hume
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the canidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy--to be followed by a dictatorship.
Alexander Fraser Tytler