Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 9

Escapers were the cream of the crop.
Sara Sheridan
Escape is a commodity like anything else
Iain Banks
Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain - eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain's own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is - if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function - so much the more is the mountain's integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.
Nan Shepherd
I realize that I am not a journalist. So anything I say is not important.
Craig Ferguson
You been mud wrestling..?' 'Only with my conscience.' 'Really? Who won?' 'Well, it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve anything.
Iain M. Banks
I was a couple of summers past twenty but I felt there were stones under that frozen, dun earth that were younger than me.
Robert Low
Whenever we put other things first, there is confusion.
Oswald Chambers
In the third place he comes on to the chiefe Organ, that is, the instrument wherewith they should sing. It is not with the Organs of the Papists, no not with thy tongue; but it is with the heart, and with the affection of a well-ruled heart. Therefore as a fiddler, or any that playes on an Instrument tempers his Instrument, that a sweete harmonie may be heard of it: Even so before thou sing, temper thou thy heart; and let thy song rise, not from thy throte, but from the depth of thine heart, that is from thine affections set upon God.
Robert Rollock
If there is one Christian left who holds out hope that a God honoring, biblically accurate, mainstream Hollywood movie will emerge, I have some advice for you…stop waiting, it’s not going to happen, move on. If you want authentic Scripture, read the Scripture.
William Branks
I really want to play Princess Leia. Stick some big pastries on my head. Now that would be interesting.
Ewan McGregor
Ultimately, you have to not worry about people thinking you should have played him differently. You're the one playing the part so it has to be yours.
Ewan McGregor
The beautiful thing about it is that no two directors or actors work the same way. You also learn not to be afraid of discussion and conflict.
Ewan McGregor
I won`t buy into the Hollywood thing...I want to be in good movies.
Ewan McGregor
Starting with a party scene for 600 cast and end up singing on top of a giant elephant...does it get any better than this?
Ewan McGregor
I wondered if that was what I was doing myself – caring so much about something that was so long gone that I was only propping it up.
Sara Sheridan
My worth to God publicly is measured by what I really am in my private life.” Oswald Chambers
Oswald Chambers
How differently we behave in other peoples countries ... no sooner than we think we can get away with it, we do as we please. It doesn't require the breakdown of a social order. It takes a six-hour plane flight.
Aminatta Forna
Beware of anything that would tarnish God's mirror in you. It is always something good stains it—good, but not best.
Oswald Chambers
It has been a wonderful experience to compete in the Olympic Games and to bring home a gold medal. But since I have been a young lad, I have had my eyes on a different prize. You see, each one of us is in a greater race than any I have run in Paris, and this race ends when God gives out the medals.
Eric Liddell
...there’s few on Earth as can cut a man deeper than his childless wife.
Craig Russell
The flames had passed over those flattened blades and consumed their heather neighbours on either side while they themselves had remained, made proof against the blaze and guaranteed their stark survival just by their earlier oppression.
Iain Banks
I should not be surprised," said Mr. Graham, "that the day should come when men will refuse to believe in God simply on the ground of the apparent injustice of things. They would argue that there might be either an omnipotent being who did not care, or a good being who could not help, but that there could not be a being both all good and omnipotent or else he would never have suffered things to be as they are.
George MacDonald
My greatest challenge is not what's happening at the moment, my greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their fucking perch. And you can print that.
Alex Ferguson
Change the problem by changing your mind.
Ken MacLeod
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
What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free—or moral—personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.
R.M. Maciver
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
Robert Louis Stevenson
People are so different in wartime. No one gets to be ordinary. Not really.
Sara Sheridan
The Clowns were Hungry. They did not want to wait to be fed. But when they sated there hunger, they wanted it to be in the right way, for the right reasons. They could wait . The Grace Keepers
Kristy Logan
When either grace is turned into painted, but rotten nature, as Arminians do, or into wantonness, as others do, the error to me is of a far other and higher elevation, than opinions touching church government. Tenacious adhering to Antinomian errors, with an obstinate and final persistence in them, both as touching faith to, and suitable practice of them, I shall think, cannot be fathered upon any of the regenerated; for it is an opinion not in the margin and borders, but in the page and body, and too near the centre and vital parts of the gospel.
Samuel Rutherford
Ever reviled, accursed, ne'er understood,Thou art the grisly terror of our age."Wreck of all order," cry the multitude,"Art thou, & war & murder's endless rage."0, let them cry. To them that ne'er have strivenThe 'truth that lies behind a word to find, To them the word's right meaning was not given.They shall continue blind among the blind.But thou, O word, so clear, so strong, so true,Thou sayest all which I for goal have taken.I give thee to the future! Thine secureWhen each at least unto himself shall waken.Comes it in sunshine? In the tempest's thrill?I cannot tell - but it the earth shall see!I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I willNot rule, & also ruled I will not be!
John Henry Mackay
Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived.Anarchy in black.
Mark Millar
I could impersonally imagine a father willingly and painlessly ending the life of a son before that life should fade and fray into the common background pattern of greedy passions and deliberate violence which is also the pattern of inevitable self-destruction.
Kenneth MacKenzie
All children think unkindly of their parents at some time or another
Kenneth MacKenzie
Why d’you think she did it?”I told him I had no idea. He seemed disappointed that I shouldn’t know.“A broken heart,” I suggested.“Do people suffer so much?”“For love? Oh, I imagine so.”“To drown herself?”“Why does that astonish you? Dido threw herself on the flames.”“In legend.”“And real life’s different?” I asked.
Ronald Frame
Above the keyhole the door has a latch. It is pretending to be an authentic old latch. The door is pretending to be an authentic old door. Maybe everything there is isn't authentic any more. Maybe everything there is is a kind of pretending.
Ali Smith
A nutritive centre, anatomically considered, is merely a cell, the nucleus of which is the permanent source of successive broods of young cells, which from time to time fill the cavity of their parent, and carrying with them the cell wall of the parent, pass off in certain directions, and under various forms, according to the texture or organ of which their parent forms a part.
John Goodsir
It was the soul of the machine, the ethological epicentre, the planetary ground zero of their commercial energy. I could almost feel it, shivering down like bomb-blasted rivers of glass from these undreaming towers of dark and light invading the snow-dark sky.
Iain M. Banks
And it was always the stories that needed the telling that gave us the rope we could cross any river with. They balanced us high above any crevasse. They made us be natural acrobats. They made us brave. They met us well. They changed us. It was in their nature to.
Ali Smith
Then I saw her smile so close to my eye that there was nothing to see but the smile and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before. Who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once
Ali Smith
He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness.
George MacDonald
She would be one of those who kneel to their own shadows till feet grow on their knees; then go down on their hands till their hands grow into feet; then lay their faces on the ground till they grow into snouts; when at last they are a hideous sort of lizards, each of which believes himself the best, wisest, and loveliest being in the world, yea, the very centre of the universe. And so they run about for ever looking for their own shadows that they may worship them, and miserable because they cannot find them, being themselves too near the ground to have any shadows; and what becomes of them at last, there is but one who knows.
George MacDonald
The touchstone of the Holy Spirit’s work in us is the answer to our Lord’s question: “Who do men say that the Son of Man is?” Our Lord makes human destiny depend on that one thing, Who men say He is, because the revelation of Who Jesus is is only given by the Holy Spirit.
Oswald Chambers
When God brings a time of waiting, and appears to be unresponsive, don't fill it with busyness, just wait.
Oswald Chambers
...never act on the impulse of that feeling. If you do, you will cause difficult situations to arise which will take years to untangle. Wait for God's timing and He will do it without any heartache or disappointment.
Oswald Chambers
One of the greatest strains in life is the strain of waiting for God.
Oswald Chambers
The inventor...looks upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world; he is haunted by an idea.
Alexander Graham Bell
I found that old Solomon proved it fair, That a big-belly'd bottle's a cure for all care.
Robert Burns
I really don't know who I am, so I don't know when to stop, so when I see a big threatening button that should never ever be touched, I just want to do this!
David Tennant
Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.
Iain Banks
Autumn leaves under frozen soles,Hungry hands turning soft and old,My hero cried as we stood out their in the cold,Like these autumn leaves I don't have nothing to holdAutumn leaves how faded now,that smile that i've lost, well i've found some how,Because you still live on in my fathers eyes,These autumn leaves, oh these autumn leaves, oh these autumn leaves are yours tonight.
Paolo Nutini
Don't bother asking for explanation, she'll just tell you that she came, in the year of the cat.
Al Stewart
...remember that the danger that is most to be feared is never the danger we are most afraid of.
Andrew Lang
...she has been bewitched by a wicked sorceress, and will not regain her beauty until she is my wife.''Does she say so? Well if you believe that you may drink cold water and think it bacon'.
Andrew Lang
And then they lived happily, and we who hear the story are happier still.
Andrew Lang
And the old woman who had been the prince’s nurse became nurse to the prince’s children — at least she was called so; though she was far too old to do anything for them but love them. Yet she still thought that she was useful, and knew that she was happy. And happy, indeed, were the prince and princess, who in due time became king and queen, and lived and ruled long and prosperously.
Andrew Lang
Madame d'Aulnoy is the true mother of the modern fairy tale. She invented the modern Court of Fairyland, with its manners, its fairies, its queens, its amorous, its cruel, its good, its evil, its odious, its friendly fées.
Andrew Lang
There is something in human pride that can stand big troubles, but we need the supernatural grace and power of God to stand by us in the little things. The tiniest detail in which we obey has all the omnipotent power of the grace of God behind it. When we do our duty, not for duty’s sake, but because we believe that God is engineering our circumstances in that way, then at the very point of our obedience the whole superb grace of God is ours.
Oswald Chambers
Once you bid farewell to discipline you say goodbye to success
Alex Ferguson
Onde you bid farewell to discipline you day goodbye to success
Alex Ferguson