Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 35

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Our ability to look back on the past, our need or desire to make sense of it, is both a blessing and a curse; and our inability to see into the future with any degree of accuracy is, simultaneously, the thing that saves us and the thing that condemns us.
James Robertson
Books make such good friends and quiet neighbors.
Catriona McPherson
To see what God is like, we must look at Jesus. He perfectly represents God to men in a form which they can see and know and understand.
William Barclay
Free-thinking” atheists is an oxymoron. They chide Christians for being narrow-minded. No one is more narrow and closed-minded than someone who claims absolutes based on what they “know” as if there is nothing more to learn. I applaud agnostics who have the intellect, humility and openness to say, “I don’t know!” or “I can’t know!” At least they admit there may be more to know!
William Branks
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus
Alexander Graham Bell
When we try to pick out any­thing by itself, we find it hitched to every­thing else in the Uni­verse.
John Muir
Every noble crown is and on Earth will forever be a crown of thorns.
Thomas Carlyle
We look upon prayer simply as a means of getting things for ourselves, but the biblical purpose of prayer is that we may get to know God Himself.
Oswald Chambers
It is very nice to think The world is full of meat and drink With little children saying grace In every Christian kind of place.
Robert Louis Stevenson
History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
Thomas Carlyle
What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?
Iain M. Banks
Watch your motive before God have no other motive in prayer than to know Him.
Oswald Chambers
He was highly spoken of, everybody knew; but nobody knew who had spoken highly of him…
Mrs. Oliphant
To reform a world, to reform a nation, no wise man will undertake; and all but foolish men know, that the only solid, though a far slower reformation, is what each begins and perfects on himself.
Thomas Carlyle
On Earth one of the things that a large proportion of the locals is most proud of is this wonderful economic system which, with a sureness and certainty so comprehensive one could almost imagine the process bears some relation to their limited and limiting notions of either thermodynamics or God, all food, comfort, energy, shelter, space, fuel and sustenance gravitates naturally and easily away from those who need it most and towards those who need it least. Indeed, those on the receiving end of such largesse are often harmed unto death by its arrival, though the effects may take years and generations to manifest themselves.
Iain M. Banks
When I was a child in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures. Fortunately, around my native town of Dunbar, by the stormy North Sea, there was no lack of wildness...
John Muir
You know, when I was in Paris, seeing Linter for the first time, I was standing at the top of some steps in the courtyard where Linter's place was, and I looked across it and there was a little notice on the wall saying it was forbidden to take photographs of the courtyard without the man's permission. [..] They want to own the light!
Iain Banks
Is there never any escaping the junkshop of the self?
Ali Smith
Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything. Unless in the first waking moment of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in you will work on a wrong level all day but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.
Oswald Chambers
Am I as spontaneously kind to God as I used to be, or am I only expecting God to be kind to me? Am I full of the little things that cheer His heart over me, or am I whimpering because things are going hardly with me? There is no joy in the soul that has forgotten what God prizes.
Oswald Chambers
Human nature if it healthy demands excitement and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way it will seek it in the wrong. God never makes bloodless stoics He makes no passionless saints.
Oswald Chambers