Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 20

Well, I myself, while sometimes unkempt by nights of drunkenness and debauchery, am quite convinced a man’s good character is marked by his impeccable attire.
Hal Duncan
At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion.
Robert Louis Stevenson
We can only be used by God after we allow Him to show us the deep, hidden areas of our own character.
Oswald Chambers
He lives who dies to win a lasting name.
Henry Drummond
My heart is sair-I dare na tell,My heart is sair for Somebody.
Robert Burns
dumb cunts vote for whoever throws the biggest promotional budget at them
Sophie Cooke
A fig for those by law protected!Liberty's a glorious feast!Courts for cowards were erected,Churches built to please the priest!
Robert Burns
We'll get there!
Ewan McGregor
Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.
Sir James Dewar
An expert from The Second Himalayan Expedition, by the Scottish mountaineer W.H.MurrayUntil one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definately commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a great respect for one of Goethe's couples:"Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!"A whole stream of events ... which no man could have dreamt would have come by his way
W.H.Murray
Go as far as you can see; when you get there, you'll be able to see further.
Thomas Carlyle
I am in love-desire, and unless you take me now, I shall fall in pieces...but I do not think I can be moderate. Forgive me, forgive me...'But her breathing was as changed now as his, and all order retreating before the strength of the living force beating about them. She pressed the latch, and set the last door to lie open.'Khush geldi: welcome: thou art come happily,' she said gently, and let him come, where he belonged, within her gouvernance.
Dorothy Dunnett
And then his true courtship of her had its beginning; and to the worship of his body, he joined the fairest garlands from the treasure-house of his mind, and made a bower for her.Adored; caressed into delight; conducted by delicate paths into ravishing labyrinths where pleasure, like carillons on glass, played upon pleasure, she leaned on his voice, and sometimes answered it.
Dorothy Dunnett
And then the blue eyes, with gentleness, scanned all her new-made body and came to rest on her eyes. 'I have begun to eat,' said Francis Crawford. 'And I have begun to slake my thirst. But in you I have found a banquet under the heavens that will serve me for ever.
Dorothy Dunnett
You became the sum total of where you lived, where you shopped, which church you went to, how many kids you had and which taxi company you used, and you only associated with people who had the same responses on their list.
Sara Sheridan
Aunts offer kids an opportunity to try out ideas that don't chime with their parents and they also demonstrate that people can get on, love each other and live together without necessarily being carbon copies.
Sara Sheridan
I’m not just a face, or a body. I’m a Havisham.
Ronald Frame
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
I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.
George MacDonald
The whole universe is but a huge Symbol of god".
Thomas Carlyle
It is very desirable to have a word to express the Availability for work of the heat in a given magazine; a term for that possession, the waste of which is called Dissipation. Unfortunately the excellent word Entropy, which Clausius has introduced in this connexion, is applied by him to the negative of the idea we most naturally wish to express. It would only confuse the student if we were to endeavour to invent another term for our purpose. But the necessity for some such term will be obvious from the beautiful examples which follow. And we take the liberty of using the term Entropy in this altered sense ... The entropy of the universe tends continually to zero.
Peter Guthrie Tait
When we try to pick out any­thing by itself, we find it hitched to every­thing else in the Uni­verse.
John Muir
All you ever were was a little bit of the universe, thinking to itself.
Iain M. Banks
The world, we are told, was made especially for man — a presumption not supported by all the facts.
John Muir
To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God.
George MacDonald
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
I will place no value on anything I have or may possess, except in relation to the kingdom of Christ. If anything will advance the interests of that kingdom, it shall be given away or kept, only as by giving or keeping it I shall most promote the glory ofHim to whom I owe all my hopes in time and eternity.
Robert Moffat
A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.
Aminatta Forna
Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better.
Thomas Carlyle
There is something hugely civilised about allowing long pauses in a conversation. Very few people can stand that kind of silence.
James Robertson
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
My definition of man is a cooking animal. The beasts have memory, judgement, and the faculties and passions of our minds in a certain degree; but no beast is a cook.
James Boswell
Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.
Sara Sheridan
The body of the last Flealouse contained the flesh of everything that had ever lived. It was content.
Alasdair Gray
It's salt. Why don't you sprinkle some on me, honey? Aren't I just good enough to eat?
Grant Morrison
Thanks cows. I appreciate your tastiness.
Craig Ferguson
Lying eats into the soul. If it becomes a habit it frays the edge of your spirit. Truth telling, although sometimes harder to do, strengthens your heart. It serves a person ill not to tell the truth.
Theresa Breslin
If someone tells you a lie, they're not telling you the truth, but they are telling you something. It just takes longer to figure out what.
Margot Livesey
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot
The cruelest lies are often told in silence.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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
Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science.
James Clerk Maxwell
What, the Great War? in which your great-grandfather, who happened to be my grandfather, was gassed in the trenches not once, but twice? Which meant he and your great-grandmother were very poor, because he was too ill to work and died young? And meant I inherited his weak lungs? Not relevant to us? her mother says. And then the break-up of the Balkans, and the start of the territorial trouble in the Middle East between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and the civil unrest in Ireland, and the shifts of power in Russia, and the power shifts in the Ottoman empire, and the bankruptcy, economic catastrophe and social unrest in Germany, all of which played a huge part in the rise of Fascism and in the bringing about of another war in which, as it happens, your own grandmother and grandfather--who happened to be my mother and father--both fought when they were just two or three years older than you? Not relevant? To us?
Ali Smith
Ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue.
George MacDonald
I suspect that much of life is like that. We seldom see what is closest to our eyes.
Jack Whyte
This place has been my home. They liked me here. Not any more. Now they will look the other way. Now I don't belong.
David Millar
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
Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less scoundrel in the world.
Thomas Carlyle
We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.
Adam Smith
The greatest thing in all the world is loving. The second greatest in all the world is learning.
George H. Morrison
She looked... She looked young, and- and--" I glanced down at Rossana gazing up at me, lips parted, eyes shining, her hair loose around her shoulders, and the next words I spoke were intended with no artifice at all. "She is almost as beautiful as you." There was laughter, and I looked up, confused. "If you wish to pay court to my daughter, Matteo, you must first speak to me," Captain dell'Orte said in mock severity. Rossana's face colored pink."Elizabetta is also very beautiful," I said quickly, thinking to cover any embarassment, but also because it was true. The adults roared with laughter. "Now Matteo seeks to woo both girls with one compliment.
Theresa Breslin
But I never just quite liked that ryhme.''Why not, child?''Because it seems to say one's as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that's lost. . . . Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight.
George MacDonald
[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.
James Robertson
[T]hose most precious memories are hidden in the safest place of all. Safe from fire or floods or war. In stories. Stories remembered, until they are ready to be told. Or perhaps simply ready to be heard.
Aminatta Forna
Sometimes the memories we cling hardest to are the ones that hurt us the most.
Elizabeth May
Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone. There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even that's just an elegant way of giving up. Washing one's hand didn't work two thousand years ago, and it doesn't work today. Involvement, Cameron, connection.
Iain Banks
In the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence.
Adam Smith
Let us suppose that the great empire of China, with all its myriads of inhabitants, was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe, who had no sort of connection with that part of the world, would be affected upon receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all, express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people, he would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and the vanity of all the labours of man, which could thus be annihilated in a moment. He would too, perhaps, if he was a man of speculation, enter into many reasonings concerning the effects which this disaster might produce upon the commerce of Europe, and the trade and business of the world in general. And when all this fine philosophy was over, when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure, take his repose or his diversion, with the same ease and tranquillity, as if no such accident had happened. The most frivolous disaster which could befall himself would occasion a more real disturbance. If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own. To prevent, therefore, this paltry misfortune to himself, would a man of humanity be willing to sacrifice the lives of a hundred millions of his brethren, provided he had never seen them? Human nature startles with horror at the thought, and the world, in its greatest depravity and corruption, never produced such a villain as could be capable of entertaining it. But what makes this difference? When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble? When we are always so much more deeply affected by whatever concerns ourselves, than by whatever concerns other men; what is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others? It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. It is a stronger power, a more forcible motive, which exerts itself upon such occasions. It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct.
Adam Smith
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
Adam Smith