Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 7

A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm,waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm likeworship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, theirsongs never cease. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
John Muir
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Celeste grabbed his arm. “You see, you are running away from the truth. Why won’t you talk about it?”“Take your hands off me. Now.”She had gone too far. She knew it would be insane to push him further, but she knew with certainty that was exactly what she was going to do. Celeste tilted her head and met his stormy eyes. “No.
Marguerite Kaye
If there is one Christian left who holds out hope that a God honoring, biblically accurate, mainstream Hollywood movie will emerge, I have some advice for you…stop waiting, it’s not going to happen, move on. If you want authentic Scripture, read the Scripture.
William Branks
By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
Adam Smith
As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free.
A.L. Kennedy
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.
Adam Smith
Cases fired by emotion rather than money were dangerous.
Sara Sheridan
Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher some spiritual hero.
Thomas Carlyle
Don't forget to pray today because God did not forget to wake you up this morning.
Oswald Chambers
Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.
A.L. Kennedy
Ah sortay jist laugh whin some cats say that racism's an English thing and we're aw Jock Tamson's bairn up here . . . it's likesay pure shite man, gadges talkin through their erses.
Irvine Welsh
Is there a difference between loving someone and being in love with someone?
Estelle Maskame
To look back upon the past year, and see how little we have striven and to what small purpose: and how often we have been cowardly and hung back, or temerarious and rushed unwisely in; and how every day and all day long we have transgressed the law of kindness; -it may seem a paradox, but in the bitterness of these discoveries, a certain consolation resides. Life is not designed to minister to a man's vanity. He goes upon his long business most of the time with a hanging head, and all the time like a blind child. Full of rewards and pleasures as it is - so that to see the day break or the moon rise, or to meet a friend, or to hear the dinner-call when he is hungry, fills him with surprising joys - this world is yet for him no abiding city. Friendships fall through, health fails, weariness assails him; year after year, he must thumb the hardly varying record of his own weakness and folly. It is a friendly process of detachment. When the time comes that he should go, there need be few illusions left about himself. Here lies one who meant well, tried a little, failed much: -surely that may be his epitaph, of which he need not be ashamed.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine. He neither endeavours to impose upon you by the cunning devices of an artful impostor, nor by the arrogant airs of an assuming pedant, nor by the confident assertions of a superficial and imprudent pretender. He is not ostentatious even of the abilities which he really possesses. His conversation is simple and modest, and he is averse to all the quackish arts by which other people so frequently thrust themselves into public notice and reputation.
Adam Smith
Fuck the epistemic modality; this is alethic modality we’re talking now, not factuality but possibility.
Hal Duncan
Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain tricks of custom: but of all these perhaps the cleverest is her knack of persuading us that the miraculous by simple repetition ceases to be miraculous.
Thomas Carlyle
I believe you to be strictly honorable.'He thoughtfully emptied his cup. 'I wish I could add you were intelligent,' he went on, knocking on his head with his knuckles.
Robert Louis Stevenson
punishment had not been spared--with best results in patience and purification
George MacDonald
We cannot buy it. We are too poor. Then men who have made the law have taken our own drink from us, and have not left us wherewith to buy it. Yet they can buy it, because they are rich. I have a feeling that that is not just. I do not grudge them their riches and all it can buy for them.
Neil M. Gunn
America truly is the best idea for a country that anyone has ever come up with so far. Not only because we value democracy and the rights of the individual, but because we are always our own most effective voice of descent....We must never mistake disagreement between Americans on political or moral issues to be an indication of their level of patriotism. If you don't like what I say or don't agree with where I stand on certain issues, then good. I'm glad we're in America, and don't have to oppress each other over it. We're not just a nation, we're not an ethnicity. We are a dream of justice that people have had for a thousand years.
Craig Ferguson
I seldom made an errand to God for another but I got something for myself.
Samuel Rutherford
Courage is the lovely virtue-the rib of Himself that God sent down to His children.
Sir James M. Barrie
He was a bad, bad bastard. He abused the privilege of being a cunt, as my old Da would say.’ I smiled, picturing the cozy fireside scene of young son on father’s knee being inducted into the world of abusive epithets.
Craig Russell
She looked at the girl in the chair and she saw what youth was. It was oblivious, with things in its ears.
Ali Smith
When a unicorn is slain, men have destroyed again the image of beauty that they seek.
Nicholas Stuart Gray
But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands.
Dorothy Dunnett
It is by no haphazard chance that in every age men have risen early to pray. The first thing that marks decline in spiritual life is our relationship to the early morning.
Oswald Chambers
What the hell do you think you are doing, creeping about in the night in woman's clothing? I could just as easily have killed you?"tThe sheer audacity of her remark rendered him speechless for a moment, and then Finlay laughed. "This, senorita, is a kilt, not a skirt, and you did not for a moment come close to killing me, though I don't doubt that you'd have tried if I'd given you half a chance.
Marguerite Kaye
With a little more patience and a little less temper, a gentler and wiser method might be found in almost every case; and the knot that we cut by some fine heady quarrel-scene in private life, or, in public affairs, by some denunciatory act against what we are pleased to call our neighbour's vices might yet have been unwoven by the hand of sympathy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I care about a lot of issues. I care about libraries, I care about healthcare, I care about homelessness and unemployment. I care about net neutrality and the steady erosion of our liberties both online and off. I care about the rich/poor divide and the rise of corporate business.
Sara Sheridan
Enough madness? Enough? And how do you measure madness? - The Joker
Grant Morrison
You would think there's a natural limit to tears: only so much the body can give at one sitting before it runs dry.
Janice Galloway
Dear Mrs Chiley," said Lucilla, "it doesn't matter in the least what you wear; there are only to be gentlemen, you, know, and one never dresses for gentlemen. (...) Their vanity is something dreadful-but it is one of my principles never to dress unless there are ladies.
Mrs. Oliphant
Saints are sinners who kept on going.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.
Sara Sheridan
Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,Thou art the grisly terror of our age."Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,"Art thou, & war & murder's endless rage."0, let them cry. To them that ne'er have strivenThe 'truth that lies behind a word to find, To them the word's right meaning was not given.They shall continue blind among the blind.But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so true,Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.I give thee to the future! Thine secureWhen each at least unto himself shall waken.Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?I cannot tell - but it the earth shall see!I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I willNot rule, & also ruled I will not be!
John Henry Mackay
It is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good.All who dream life, instead of living it,require some similar shock.
George MacDonald
Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Nature  …   has made it impossible for us to have any communication from this earth with the other great bodies of the universe, in our present state; and it is highly possible that he has likewise cut off all communication betwixt the other planets, and betwixt the different systems.… We observe, in all of them, enough to raise our curiosity, but not to satisfy it  …   It does not appear to be suitable to the wisdom that shines throughout all nature, to suppose that we should see so far, and have our curiosity so much raised  …   only to be disappointed at the end  …   This, therefore, naturally leads us to consider our present state as only the dawn or beginning of our existence, and as a state of preparation or probation for farther advancement.…
Colin Maclaurin
Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament but in the Reporters' gallery yonder there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all.
Thomas Carlyle
Our Lord never referred to unanswered prayer he taught that prayers are always answered. He ever implied that prayers were answered rightly because of the Heavenly Father's wisdom.
Oswald Chambers
There are no gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
Iain Banks
He who will not reason is a bigot he who cannot is a fool and he who dares not is a slave.
William Drummond
To say that 'prayer changes things' is not as close to the truth as saying, 'prayer changes me and then I change things.' God has established things so that prayer, on the basis of redemption, changes the way a person looks at things.
Oswald Chambers
Because, George thought as she sat there with her eyes closed back before Christmas in Mrs Rock's self-consciously comfortable chair in the counselling office, how can it be that there's an advert on TV with dancing bananas unpeeling themselves in it and teabags doing a dance, and her mother will never see that advert? How can that advert exist and her mother not exist in the world?She didn't say it out loud, though, because there wasn't a point.It isn't about saying.It is about the hole which will form in the roof through which the cold will intensify and after which the structure of the house will begin to shift, like it ought, and through which George will be able to lie every night in bed watching the black sky.
Ali Smith
... Man is not truly one, but truly two... even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both...
Robert Louis Stevenson
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
John Muir
In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it.
Sara Sheridan
your god may be your little Christian habit - the habit of prayer or Bible reading at certain times of your day. Watch how your Father will upset your schedule if you begin to worship your habit instead of what the habit symbolizes. We say, 'I can't do that right now; this is my time alone with God.' No, this is your time alone with your habit.
Oswald Chambers
there were lovely things in the world, lovely that didn't endure, and the lovelier for that... Nothing endures.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Adversity is like the period of the rain ... cold comfortless unfriendly to man and to animal yet from that season have their birth the flower the fruit the date the rose and the pomegranate.
Sir Walter Scott
He stopped at an intersection, panting, rubbing at the twinge in his hamstrings, looking around, though he knew no cars were coming in either direction.Dropping forward at the waist Martin admitted that he was fucking himself up. Dr Leonowsky told him: hurting yourself is an articulation of self-disgust. It helps no one, prevents nothing. This wasn’t a glorious loss of control, he was fooling himself, it was self-harm.
Denise Mina
You been mud wrestling..?' 'Only with my conscience.' 'Really? Who won?' 'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve anything.
Iain M. Banks
Ultimately, you have to not worry about people thinking you should have played him differently. You're the one playing the part so it has to be yours.
Ewan McGregor
School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able, I read, alone. Under the covers with a flashlight or in my corner of the attic—I sought solace in books. It was from books that I started to get an inkling of the kinds of assholes I was dealing with. I found allies too, in books, characters my age who were going through or had triumphed against the same bullshit.
Craig Ferguson
It took a certain kind of person to come from luxury and seek out danger.
Sara Sheridan
His religion at best is an anxious wish - like that of Rebelais a great Perhaps.
Thomas Carlyle
I didn’t want to give up my job and join the ranks of the Doing Fuck All brigade no matter how much money I had in the bank.
Sara Sheridan
The smell of tobacco usually reminded Mirabelle of being a child – coming downstairs in the morning when the dinner party her parents had hosted the night before was cleared away, but the scent of cigars still lingered.
Sara Sheridan