Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 36

Some hae meat and canna eat,And some wad eat that want it,But we hae meat and we can eat,And sae the Lord be thankit.
Robert Burns
My love is like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June: My love is like the melody That's sweetly played in tune. How fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in love am I; And I will love thee still, my dear, Till all the seas gang dry. Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt with the sun;I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands of life shall run. And fare thee weel, my only love. And fare thee weel awhile! And I will come again, my love, Though it were ten thousand mile.
Robert Burns
I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.
George MacDonald
MortalityOh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?Like a swift-fleeting meteor, a fast-flying cloud,A flash of the lightning, a break of the wave,He passes from life to his rest in the grave.The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade,Be scattered around, and together be laid;And the young and the old, the low and the high,Shall molder to dust, and together shall lie.Yea, hope and despondency, pleasure and pain,Are mingled together in sunshine and rain;And the smile and the tear, the song and the dirge,Still follow each other, like surge upon surge.'Tis the wink of an eye - 'tis the draught of a breath -From the blossom of health to the paleness of death,From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroudOh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?
William Knox
Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza."Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival.""So... your religion dies with you. How sad," Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass.
Iain Banks
The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop.
George MacDonald
You have tasted of death now,” said the old man. “Is it good?” “It is good,” said Mossy. “It is better than life.”“No,” said the old man: “it is only more life.
George MacDonald
Just for a while": Death's opening chat-up line in His great seduction, before he drugged you with soporific comforts, distracted you with minor luxuries and ensnared you with long-term payment plans.Join the Rat Race "just for a while."Concentrate on your career "just for a while."Move in with your girlfriend "just for a while."Find a bigger place, out in the burbs "just for a while."Lie down in that wooden box "just for a while.
Christopher Brookmyre
The dead man is on the trolley and the woman collapses across his chest. That's what the ghouls want a shufti at, like at that Princess Diana's funeral, they want to scrutinise those who really knew her, to drink the misery out of their faces.
Irvine Welsh
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
I just took [my cancer diagnosis] as bad luck, basically. It did strike me almost immediately, my atheist sort of thing kicked in and I thought "ha, if I was a God-botherer, I'd be thinking, why me God? What have I done to deserve this?" and I thought at least I'm free of that, at least I can simply treat it as bad luck and get on with it.
Iain M. Banks
REQUIEMUnder the wide and starry skyDig the grave and let me lie:Glad did I live and gladly die,And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you grave for me:Here he lies where he long'd to be;Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
Robert Louis Stevenson
I was with a friend of mine recently who was dying and while he was lying there with his family around his bed, I just knew that was it, that was the best you can hope for in life - to have your family and the people who love you around you at the end.
Ewan McGregor
I knew that I had been partially right in the storeroom above the bar on Christmas Day. Whoever I had become had to die.
Craig Ferguson
Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep.
Robert Louis Stevenson
This time it is real — all must die, and where could mountaineer find a more glorious death!
John Muir
To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die.
Thomas Campbell
There are some of you here today who feel like dead people. It is as if you are already six feet under, staring up at the top of your own locked coffin. This morning Jesus wants to set you free. You simply have to let go of the key and pass it through the little hole, where you see a tiny shaft of light.
Sheila Walsh
She could now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She believed more and more that not anything worth having is ever lost; that even the most evanescent shades of feeling are safe for those who grow after their true nature, toward that for which they were made—in other and higher words, after the will of God.
George MacDonald
He who has health, has hope; and he who has hope, has everything
Thomas Carlyle
To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
Adam Smith
Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.
Samuel Smiles
A man is a fool to live in hopes of a better tomorrow. I have a thousand, better ways today to spend what time remains ahead of me, and I have brighter, lighter and more pleasant places in which to spend it.
Jack Whyte
But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope,That one day we shall thank thee perfectlyFor pain and hope and all that led or droveUs back into the bosom of thy love.
George MacDonald
It is of no use mincing the matter; Dr John Marsh, after being regarded by his friends at home as hopelessly unimpressible—in short, an absolute woman-hater—had found his fate on a desolate isle of the Southern seas, he had fallen—nay, let us be just—had jumped over head and ears in love with Pauline Rigonda! Dr Marsh was no sentimental die-away noodle who, half-ashamed, half-proud of his condition, displays it to the semi-contemptuous world. No; after disbelieving for many years in the power of woman to subdue him, he suddenly and manfully gave in—sprang up high into the air, spiritually, and so to speak, turning a sharp somersault, went headlong down deep into the flood, without the slightest intention of ever again returning to the surface.
R.M. Ballantyne
Love is not maximum emotion. Love is maximum commitment.
Sinclair B. Ferguson
There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
She still cared for me, and the best way I could make amends to her was to be happy.I do have a knack for finding great women.
Craig Ferguson
Clearly the secret of happiness...is a variation on the general principle of banging your head against a wall, and then stopping.
Stef Penney
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. Avarice over-rates the difference between poverty and riches: ambition, that between a private and a public station: vain-glory, that between obscurity and extensive reputation. The person under the influence of any of those extravagant passions, is not only miserable in his actual situation, but is often disposed to disturb the peace of society, in order to arrive at that which he so foolishly admires. The slightest observation, however, might satisfy him, that, in all the ordinary situations of human life, a well-disposed mind may be equally calm, equally cheerful, and equally contented. Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others: but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice; or to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.
Adam Smith
Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing,”George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin
George MacDonald
This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: To set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent on him; and, after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which come to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner which, in his judgement, is best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community--the man of wealth thus becoming the mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer, doing for them better than they would or could do for themselves.
Andrew Carnegie
Baxter knows a lot more than I do, I told her.Yes, said Baxter, but I will never tell people all of it.
Alasdair Gray
A people religiously right, will not long remain politically wrong.
William Arnot
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
John Witherspoon
People talk to old people like they're children.'Oh you're very old aren't you?' Yeah I'm old. I'm not stupid.
Craig Ferguson
There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.
Robert Burns
Go where thou wilt, thou canst not go out of thy Father's ground.
Thomas Boston
But deep this truth impress'd my mind: Thro' all His works abroad,The heart benevolent and kindThe most resembles God.
Robert Burns
Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.
George MacDonald
Live near to God, and so all things will appear to you little In comparison to eternal realities.--
Robert Murray McCheyne
God always ignores the present perfection for the ultimate perfection.
Oswald Chambers
A time is coming when the whole round world will know that God reigns and that God is Love, when hell and heaven, life and death, sin and salvation, will be read and understood aright at last.
Oswald Chambers
Funny... I still can't believe in God." "Does that matter now?"..."He believes in you.
A.J. Cronin
One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—-Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—-if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them.
George MacDonald
I don't believe in angels and I have trouble with the whole God thing. I don't want to say I don't believe in God but I don't think I do. But I believe in people who do.
Billy Connolly
Don't forget to pray today because God did not forget to wake you up this morning.
Oswald Chambers
It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause
David Hume
I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.
George MacDonald
If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction.
George MacDonald
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
All that is not God is death.
George MacDonald
If this book has made any point clear, I hope it's that things don't have to be real to be true. Or vice versa.
Grant Morrison
You, dear reader, have now two accounts to choose between and there can be no doubt which is most probable.
Alasdair Gray
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Trust the story ... the storyteller may dissemble and deceive, the story can't: the story can only ever be itself.
James Robertson
What hinders me from hearing is that I am taken up with other things. It is not that I will not hear God, but I am not devoted in the right place. I am devoted to things, to service, to convictions, and God may say what He likes but I do not hear Him.
Oswald Chambers
His readiness to undergo persecutions for his beliefs, the high moral character of the men who believed in him and looked up to him as leader, and the greatness of his ultimate achievement - all argue his fundamental integrity. To suppose Muhammad an impostor raises more problems than it solves. Moreover, none of the great figures of history is so poorly appreciated in the West as Muhammad
William Montgomery Watt
She had the best kind of courage, or maybe the worst kind, the kind that gets you into trouble.
Alistair MacLean