Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 7

In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people with their wisdom and unwisdom.
Thomas Carlyle
Above all am I convinced of the need irrevocable and inescapable of every human heart for God. No matter how we try to escape to lose ourselves in restless seeking we cannot separate ourselves from our divine source. There is no substitute for God.
A.J. Cronin
Not only then has each man his individual relation to God but each man has his peculiar relation to God.
George MacDonald
Every conjecture we can form with regard to the works of God has as little probability as the conjectures of a child with regard to the works of a man.
Thomas Reid
The very first condition of lasting happiness is that a life should be full of purpose aiming at something outside self.
Hugh Black
Nothing is more terrible than activity without insight.
Thomas Carlyle
An aspiration is a joy forever a possession as solid as a landed estate a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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. But the first broadside puts all to rights.
Sir Walter Scott
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and make a fall.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The end of man is action.
Thomas Carlyle
Everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore And coming events cast their shadows before.
Thomas Campbell
Should auld acquaintances be forgot And never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot And days o'auld lang syne?
James Drummond Burns
A friend is a present you give to yourself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I like a highland friend who will stand by me not only when I am in the right but when I am a little in the wrong.
Sir Walter Scott
Nothing is more limiting than a closed circle of acquaintanceship where every avenue of conversation has been explored and social exchanges are fixed in a known routine.
A.J. Cronin
The truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The chain of friendship however bright does not stand the attrition of constant close contact.
Sir Walter Scott
I am learning to live close to the lives of my friends without ever seeing them. No miles of any measurement can separate your soul from mine.
John Muir
We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop there is at last a drop which makes it run over. So in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.
James Boswell
A friend in need is a friend indeed.
Susan Ferrier
So long as we love we serve so long as we are loved by others I would almost say that we are indispensable and no man is useless while he has a friend.
Robert Louis Stevenson
One never hugs one's good luck so affectionately as when listening to the relation of some horrible misfortunes which has overtaken others.
Alexander Smith
Health is the vital principle of bliss.
James Thomson
Forgiveness is the giving and so the receiving of life.
George MacDonald
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The greatest of faults I should say is to be conscious of none.
Thomas Carlyle
Faith is loyalty to some inspired teacher some spiritual hero.
Thomas Carlyle
Faith is a practical attitude of the will.
John MacMurray
Faith is a total attitude of the self.
John Macquarrie
Faith is the proper name of religious experience.
John Baillie
The principle part of faith is patience.
George MacDonald
So often we have a kind of vague wistful longing that the promises of Jesus should be true. The only way really to enter into them is to believe them with the clutching intensity of a drowning man.
William Barclay
When the first baby laughed for the first time the laugh broke into a million pieces and they all went skipping about. That was the beginning of fairies.
Sir James Matthew Barrie
To avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to push forward pluckily and fall.
Robert Louis Stevenson
A man finds he has been wrong at every stage of his career only to deduce the astonishing conclusion that he is at last entirely right.
Robert Louis Stevenson
I grow daily to honor facts more and more and theory less and less.
Thomas Carlyle
Experience is the best of schoolmasters only the school-fees are heavy.
Thomas Carlyle
Coming events cast their shadows before.
Thomas Campbell
The most unhappy of all men is he who believes himself to be so.
David Hume
Sleep Silence's child sweet father of soft rest Prince whose approach peace to all mortals brings Indifferent host to shepherds and kings Sole comforter to minds with grief oppressed.
William Drummond
It is energy the central element of which is will that produces the miracles of enthusiasm in all ages. It is the mainspring of what is called force of character and the sustaining power of all great action.
Samuel Smiles
Give me a man who sings at his work.
Thomas Carlyle
Human nature if it healthy demands excitement and if it does not obtain its thrilling excitement in the right way it will seek it in the wrong. God never makes bloodless stoics He makes no passionless saints.
Oswald Chambers
When Britain first at Heaven's command Arose from out the azure main This was the charter of the land And Guardian angels sung this strain "Rule Britannia! rule the waves Britons never will be slaves."
James Thomson
Rule Britannia Britannia rule the waves Britains never will be slaves.
James Thomson
He is . . . like many other geniuses a greater friend to the bottle than the bottle is to him.
William Lyon Mackenzie
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft a-gley And leave us nought but grief and pain For promised joy.
James Drummond Burns
It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Of all paths a man could strike into there is at any given moment a best path which here and now it were of all things wisest for him to do. To find this path and walk in it is the one thing needful for him.
Thomas Carlyle
It is the heart always that sees before the head can see.
Thomas Carlyle
If there is another world he lives in bliss. If there is none he made the best of this.
Robert Burns
Nature's mighty law is change.
Robert Burns
To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank not as a prophet but as an unteachable brat well birched and none the wiser.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Today is not yesterday how can our works and thoughts if they are always to be the fittest continue always the same? Change indeed is painful yet ever needful.
Thomas Carlyle
And Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell!
Thomas Campbell
The moment one definitely commits oneself then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred. A stream of events issues from the decision raising unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.
W.H.Murray
Courage is the lovely virtue-the rib of Himself that God sent down to His children.
Sir James M. Barrie
Courage is the footstool of the Virtues upon which they stand.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There is a time when to avoid trouble is to store up trouble and when to seek for a lazy and a cowardly peace is to court a still greater danger.
William Barclay