Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 8

Ambition is the necessary spur of a great mind to great action; when acting upon a weak mind it impels it to absurdity, or sours it with discontent.
Frances Wright
I thought of myself mixing the fragrance of a certain day – the heavy musk of the hillside after the rain with the lightness of fresh blossoms doused in the downpour. I thought of each little bottle as the essence of a happy day or a sad one. I mixed the scent of a lonely moment – sandalwood and bergamot lingering over a rich, peppery base.
Sara Sheridan
Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.
Iain Banks
Such I hold to be the genuine use of Gunpowder: that it makes all men tall.
Thomas Carlyle
Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form—spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved
George MacDonald
You must suffer me to go my own dark way.
Robert Louis Stevenson
When in doubt about who's to blame. Blame the English.
Craig Ferguson
But besides that I was of an unforgiving disposition from my birth, slow to take offense, slower to forget it, and now incensed both against my companion and myself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
At length, when I considered it, I realized that the best of my actions were small things. Picking flowers and cooking food for my mother when she had been unwell, spending an afternoon with the children, sending money to my sister or kissing Henry’s tiny head as he slept in the nursery before I left. I thought of every detail and afterwards I felt better. Hellfire and brimstone have never appealed to me and I admit I become easily confused thinking of right and wrong. But I do understand kindness.
Sara Sheridan
Celeste." Jack grinned. "How every appropriate. An angel sent from heaven to relieve my boredom.""An artist sent from France to paint your brother's estate," she retorted."Touché'. In that case we should get down to business.
Marguerite Kaye
People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.
Sara Sheridan
I don't think you really belong here, Aviger." Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. "I don't think any of us do.""The brave belong where they decide." Some harshness entered the Idiran's voice.
Iain Banks
I'm accustomed to reading Georgian and Victorian letters and sometimes you simply know in your gut that a blithe sentence is covering up a deeper emotion.
Sara Sheridan
For some the label sci-fi is just a shortand for science fiction, an alternative to sf gesturing at ... you know, that stuff we like.
Hal Duncan
I can't bear literary snobbery.
Sara Sheridan
Change the problem by changing your mind.
Ken MacLeod
There are impertinent inquiries made; your rule is, to leave the inquirer uninformed on the matter; not, if you can help it, misinformed, but precisely as dark as he was!
Thomas Carlyle
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
Never allow anything to divert you from your insight into Jesus Christ. It is the true test of whether you are spiritual or not. To be unspiritual means that other things have a growing fascination for you. Since mine eyes have looked on Jesus, I’ve lost sight of all beside, So enchained my spirit’s vision, Gazing on the Crucified.
Oswald Chambers
Alexander Smollett, master; David Livesey, ship's doctor; Abraham Gray, carpenter's mate; John Trelawney, owner; John Hunter and Richard Joyce, owner's servants, landsmen--being all that is left faithful of the ship's company--with stores for ten days at short rations, came ashore this day and flew British colours on the log-house in Treasure Island. Thomas Redruth, owner's servant, landsman, shot by the mutineers; James Hawkins, cabin boy--'And at the same time, I was wondering over poor Jim Hawkins' fate.
Robert Louis Stevenson
In the time we have it is surely our duty to do all the good we can to all the people we can in all the ways we can.
William Barclay
No mortal ear could have heard the kelpie passing through the night, for the great black hooves of it were as soundless in their stride as feathers falling.
Mollie Hunter
The setting sunWith yellow radiance lighten'd all the vale;And as the warriors moved, each polish'd helm,Corslet or spear, glanced back his gilded beams.The hill they climbed, and halting at its top,Of more than mortal size, towering, they seem'dA host angelic, clad in burning arms.
John Home
God's time is slow, patient, and kind and welcomes friendship; it is a way of being in the fullness of time that is not determined by productivity, success, or linear movements toward personal goals. It is a way of love, a way of the heart.
John Swinton
I never knew You lived so close to the floor,but every time I am bowed down,crushed by this weight of grief,I feel Your hand on my head,Your breath on my cheek,Your tears on my neck.You never tell me to pull myself together,to stem the flow of many years.You simply stay by my sidefor as long as it takes,so close to the floor.
Sheila Walsh
And see ye not that braid braid roadThat lies across that lily leven?That is the path of wickednessThough some call it the road to heaven
Thomas the Rhymer (ballad)
As Mr. R. U. Sayee has well said: 'It should be clear a priori that fairy lore must have developed as a result of modifications and accretions received in different countries and at many periods, though we must not overlook the part played by tradition in providing a mould that to some extent determines the nature of later additions.' It must also be self-evident that a great deal of confusion has been caused by the assumption that some spirit-types were fairies which in a more definite sense are certainly not of elfin provenance. In some epochs, indeed, Faerie appears to have been regarded as a species of limbo to which all 'pagan' spirits - to say nothing of defeated gods, monsters, and demons - could be banished, along with the personnel of Olympus and the rout of witchcraft. Such types, however, are usually fairly easy of detection.
Lewis Spence
Come to the woods, for here is rest, ...climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees.
John Muir
All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The writing talent of Edinburgh is textured - we have poets, novelists, non-fiction writers, dramatists and more.
Sara Sheridan
The purpose of prayer is to reveal the presence of God equally present all the time in every condition.
Oswald Chambers
To be honest, to be kind - to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation - above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself - here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.
Thomas Carlyle
Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.
Adam Smith
Every poet... finds himself born in the midst of prose. He has to struggle from the littleness and obstruction of an actual world into the freedom and infinitude of an ideal.
Thomas Carlyle
Anything that elicits an immediate nod of recognition has only reconfirmed a prejudice.
Don Paterson
Every time we pray our horizon is altered our attitude to things is altered not sometimes but every time and the amazing thing is that we don't pray more.
Oswald Chambers
My worth to God publicly is measured by what I really am in my private life.” Oswald Chambers
Oswald Chambers
[Richard Bedford Bennett] was the richest Prime Minister and the only millionaire to hold office before Pierre Trudeau. His money obviously colored his thinking -- colored it true blue -- but he did not consider it a political drawback. No leader, he said, could serve the public properly if he was constantly looking over his shoulder at the shadow of debts. This theory is now widely accepted in the United States where it has become practically impossible for a non-millionaire to run for high office without selling pieces of himself like a prize-fighter. Yet the public still suspects a self-made millionaire like Lyndon Johnson while revering the much-richer John F. Kennedy, who got it all from his father.
Gordon Donaldson
It is only when I dally with what I am about look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart.
Sir Walter Scott
You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you really lived are the moments when you have done things in the spirit of love.
Henry Drummond
A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.
Sara Sheridan
Skepticism means not intellectual doubt alone but moral doubt.
Thomas Carlyle
You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.
Sara Sheridan
Anyone who, neglecting that fixed hour of prayer, [will] say he can pray at all times but will probably end in praying at no time.
Eric Liddell
Life on earth survives thanks to diversity, says Sekunda, because changing circumstances means today's winners can suddenly become tomorrow's losers. When the meteor hits, when the Green Revolution fails, when the bees unexpectedly die, the kind of anomalous diversity found in the Galapagos Islands—or in the technology of Japan—is exactly what will save us from the most dangerous failure of all: global success.
Momus
It was nearly ten years since the peace though her memories of the war still felt fresh.
Sara Sheridan
How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of result
George MacDonald
Wherever we are it is but a stage on the way to somewhere else and whatever we do however well we do it it is only a preparation to do something else that shall be different.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Paul was devoted to a Person, not a cause.
Oswald Chambers
The public! why the public's nothing better than a great baby.
Thomas Chalmers
I sucked that smoke in and made it part of me, joined mystically with the universe right at that point, said Yes to drugs forever just by the unique hit I got from that one packet of fags Andy liberated from his dad. It was a revelation, an epiphany; a sudden realisation that it was possible for matter - something there in front of you, in your hand, in your lungs, in your pocket - to take your brain apart and reassemble it in ways you hadn't thought of previously. This was better than religion, or this was what people meant by religion! The whole point was that this worked! People said Believe In God or Do Well At School or Buy This or Vote For Me or whatever, but nothing ever worked the way substances worked, nothing ever fucking delivered the way they did. They were truth. Everything else was falsehood.
Iain Banks
And the only sign of life is the ticking of the pen, introducing characters to memory like old friends.
Fish
Man an animal that makes bargains.
Adam Smith
I wished that my own bones were unbound, I wished they were mingling, picked clean by fish, with the bones of another body, a body my bones and heart and soul had loved with unfathomable certainty for decades, and both of us down deep now, lost to everything but the fact of bare bones on a dark seabed.
Ali Smith
Giving out of your surplus does not make you generous, it makes your selfishness more tolerable! Giving while you are lacking is what pleases the Lord.
William Branks
In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people with their wisdom and unwisdom.
Thomas Carlyle
The smallest issues can become the most important things in life and reality slips away.
David Millar
here is nothing which any way pertains to the the worship of God left to the determination of human laws, besides the mere circumstances, which neither have any holiness in them, forasmuch as they have no other use and praise in sacred than which have in civil things, nor yet were particularly determinable in Scripture.
George Gillespie
Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-demand principle; they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them. to order, to just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner.
Thomas Carlyle