Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 26

The rule was that they never went to the same place twice
Mhairi McFarlane
To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.
George MacDonald
Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind.
George MacDonald
If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise.
George MacDonald
In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight.
George MacDonald
And habits are hell's own substitute for good intentions. Habits are the ruin of ambition, of initiative , of imagination. They're the curse of marriage and the after-bane of death.
Dorothy Dunnett
Like good reading skills, good writing skills require immersion and imaginative engagement.
Sara Sheridan
He who indulges habitually in the intoxicating pleasures of imagination, for the very reason that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, must resign himself to a keener pain, a more intolerable and utter prostration.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Grabbing readers by the imagination is a writer's job.
Sara Sheridan
A paucity of material can open up just as many possibilities.
Sara Sheridan
I spend a lot of time imagining things - in fact, you could say that imagining things is my job.
Sara Sheridan
Vesta was so good with paperwork – you could hand her a file of drab, seemingly dull information and she’d construct a story from it worthy of a novel.
Sara Sheridan
The interior of our skulls contains a portal to infinity.
Grant Morrison
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...
Adam Smith
I pride myself on making my own decisions, sir," she said. "I do not welcome gentlemen making them for me.
Sara Sheridan
I have more than once tried to analyse this apparently deliberate form of self-torture that seems common to so many people in face of the extinction of a valued life, human or animal, and it springs, I think, from a negation of death, as if by summoning and arranging these subjective images one were in some way cheating the objective fact. It is, I believe, an entirely instinctive process, and the distress it brings with it is an incidental, a by-product, rather than a masochistic end.
Gavin Maxwell
If you've been hurt and you've grieved and you've been through the mill, it takes a long time to get over it.
Sara Sheridan
I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away.
Iain M. Banks
[T]here can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered.
Iain M. Banks
It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other rest for heart and soul than He has created. From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set us free.
George MacDonald
It's always the same with lost people; you start out looking for them, and you end up losing yourself.
Grant Morrison
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
Jack had been the love of her life and he was gone. It seemed now that there had never been bad times, though she knew that wasn’t true.
Sara Sheridan
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
When you go,if you go,And I should want to die,there's nothing I'd be saved bymore than the timeyou fell asleep in my armsin a trust so gentleI let the darkening roomdrink up the evening, tillrest, or the new rainlightly roused you awake.I asked if you heard the rain in your dreamand half dreaming still you only said, I love you.
Edwin Morgan
We are forgiven, that we may be like Him who forgives us.
Horatius Bonar
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
There had been a time in Godfrey's life when, had she stood before him in all her splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was humbler.
George MacDonald
It had been well if he had been left with only a wounded heart, but in that heart lay wounded pride. He hid it carefully, and the keener in consequence grew the sensitiveness, almost feminine, which no stranger could have suspected beneath the manner he wore. Under that bronzed countenance, with its firm-set mouth and powerful jaw--below that clear blue eye, and that upright easy carriage, lay a faithful heart haunted by a sense of wrong: he who is not perfect in forgiveness must be haunted thus; he only is free whose love for the human is so strong that he can pardon the individual sin; he alone can pray the prayer,"Forgive us our trespasses," out of a full heart. Forgiveness is the only cure of wrong. And hand in hand with Sense-of-injury walks ever the weak sister-demon Self-pity, so dear, so sweet to many--both of them the children of Philautos, not of Agape.
George MacDonald
In Him we have . . . the forgiveness of sins . . . —Ephesians 1:7Beware of the pleasant view of the fatherhood of God: God is so kind and loving that of course He will forgive us. That thought, based solely on emotion, cannot be found anywhere in the New Testament. The only basis on which God can forgive us is the tremendous tragedy of the Cross of Christ. To base our forgiveness on any other ground is unconscious blasphemy. The only ground on which God can forgive our sin and reinstate us to His favor is through the Cross of Christ. There is no other way! Forgiveness, which is so easy for us to accept, cost the agony at Calvary. We should never take the forgiveness of sin, the gift of the Holy Spirit, and our sanctification in simple faith, and then forget the enormous cost to God that made all of this ours.Forgiveness is the divine miracle of grace. The cost to God was the Cross of Christ. To forgive sin, while remaining a holy God, this price had to be paid. Never accept a view of the fatherhood of God if it blots out the atonement. The revealed truth of God is that without the atonement He cannot forgive— He would contradict His nature if He did. The only way we can be forgiven is by being brought back to God through the atonement of the Cross. God’s forgiveness is possible only in the supernatural realm.Compared with the miracle of the forgiveness of sin, the experience of sanctification is small. Sanctification is simply the wonderful expression or evidence of the forgiveness of sins in a human life. But the thing that awakens the deepest fountain of gratitude in a human being is that God has forgiven his sin. Paul never got away from this. Once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, you will be held as in a vise, constrained by the love of God.
Oswald Chambers
I can be said truly to know who and what I am only because there are others who can be said truly to know who and what I am.
Alasdair MacIntyre
The proof that our relationship is right with God is that we do our best whether we feel inspired or not.
Oswald Chambers
If you can't trust, you can't be trustworthy.
Craig Ferguson
For others, as for ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly understand anything, that would be enough to prove it undivine; and that which is but one step beyond our understanding must be in some of its relations as mysterious as if it were a hundred.
George MacDonald
You can’t trust anyone you have to pay, and really, they can’t trust you.
Sara Sheridan
We were perfectly decorous together. It took the will of both of us. I trusted him with me, and myself with him.
Ronald Frame
He comes where He commands us to leave.
Oswald Chambers
Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.
George MacDonald
To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.
George MacDonald
When you are in the dark, listen, and God will give you a very precious message for someone else once you are back in the light.
Oswald Chambers
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
George MacDonald
How had it come about that these particular designs were chosen as our letters? Who decreed what sound would accompany each shape? And how was it decided the manner they would come together to form a word? 'Why is this so?' I demanded to know.
Theresa Breslin
We can learn so much looking outside our core field of expertise.
Sara Sheridan
[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success
Iain M. Banks
You can only learn through failure, and what ye learn is the importance ay preparation.
Irvine Welsh
That was the river, this is the sea.
Mike Scott
Obedience is the opener of eyes.
George MacDonald
Lord, behold our family here assembled. We thank You for this place in which we dwell, for the love accorded us this day, for the hope with which we expect the morrow; for the health, the work, the food and the bright skies that make our lives delightful; for our friends in all parts of the earth. Give us courage and gaiety and the quiet mind. Spare us to our friends, soften us to our enemies. Bless us, if it may be, in all our innocent endeavors; if it may not, give us strength to endure that which is to come that we may be brave in peril, constant in tribulation, temperate in wrath and in all changes of fortune and down to the gates of death, loyal and loving to one another. We beseech of you this help and mercy for Christ's sake.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Only one in a thousand sits down in the midst of it all and says—I will watch my Father mend this. God must not be treated as a hospital for our broken “toys,” but as our Father.
Oswald Chambers
When we lose sight of God we become hard and dogmatic. We hurl our own petitions at God’s throne and dictate to Him as to what we wish Him to do. We do not worship God, nor do we seek to form the mind of Christ. If we are hard towards God, we will become hard towards other people.
Oswald Chambers
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
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
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
The knowledge of our union with Christ...gives us confidence in prayer. It was when Jesus had begun to expound the closeness of this union that he also began to introduce the disciples to the true heart of prayer. If Christ abides in us and we abide in him, as his word dwells in us, and we pray in his name, that God hears us (Jn 15:4-7). But all of these expressions are simply extensions of the one fundamental idea: If I am united to Christ, then all that is his is mine. So long as my heart, will and mind are one with Christ's in his word, I can approach God with the humble confidence that my prayers will be heard and answered.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
O Lord, I have been talking to the people;Thought's wheels have round me whirled a fiery zoneAnd the recoil of my word's airy rippleMy heart unheedful has puffed up and blown.Therefore I cast myself before thee prone:Lay cool hands on my burning brain and press From my weak heart the swelling emptiness.
George MacDonald
No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.
George MacDonald
I can but pray the Father o' a' to haud his e'e upon her, an' his airms aboot her, an' keep aff the hardenin' o' the hert 'at despises coonsel!
George MacDonald
He who makes his needs known to God gains for immediate answer "the peace of God which passeth understanding," and can wait God’s time for the rest.
Alexander MacLaren
If you knew particularly what to do, it were not a spiritual exercise.
Samuel Rutherford
The purpose of prayer is that we get ahold of God, not of the answer.
Oswald Chambers