Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 5

I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it.
Alasdair Gray
We are forgiven, that we may be like Him who forgives us.
Horatius Bonar
The future is not a gift - it is an achievement.
Harry Lauder
The ability to overcome failure--to live through it and move on--is crucial. If we are not willing to face failure--if we don't have the skills to survive it--we have precluded any real creativity or risk. Failure may never become our friend, but if we are to do meaningful work, perhaps failure needs to be our companion.
John Hunter
I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity
Grant Morrison
Hatred and anger are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. There is, in the very feeling of those passions, something harsh, jarring, and convulsive, something that tears and distracts the breast, and is altogether destructive of that composure and tranquillity of mind which is so necessary to happiness, and which is best promoted by the contrary passions of gratitude and love.
Adam Smith
She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.
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
Lying here, during all this time after my own small fall, it has become my conviction that things mean pretty much what we want them to mean. We’ll pluck significance from the least consequential happenstance if it suits us and happily ignore the most flagrantly obvious symmetry between separate aspects of our lives if it threatens some cherished prejudice or cosily comforting belief; we are blindest to precisely whatever might be most illuminating.
Iain M. Banks
We, ironically known as the civilizados - in practically everything that matters they're a damned sight more civilized than we are - bring them so-called progress, which harms them, so-called change, which harms them, so-called civilization, which harms them even more, and desease, which kills them.
Alistair MacLean
Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Sara Sheridan
Oh, adjust yourself. You people have spent ten millennia playing at soldiers while becoming ever more dedicated civilians. We've spent the last thousand years trying hard to stay civilian while refining the legacy of a won galactic war.
Iain M. Banks
The thoughts of his mind, besides, were of the gloomiest dye; and when he glanced at the companion of his drive, he was conscious of some touch of that terror of the law and the law’s officers, which may at times assail the most honest.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Ferbin's father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution.
Iain M. Banks
We can only be used by God after we allow Him to show us the deep, hidden areas of our own character.
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
A lot of parents tell their children that if they want to be an actor, that's fine, but they should do something else first, so they've got something to fall back on. It doesn't work like that, as far as I'm concerned.
Ewan McGregor
While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,The fate of empires and the fall of kings;While quacks of State must each produce his plan,And even children lisp the Rights of Man;Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
Robert Burns
...properly a theory about knowledge, not about religion. A theist and a Christian may be an agnostic; an atheist may not be an agnostic. An atheist may deny that there is God, and in this case his atheism is dogmatic and not agnostic. Or he may refuse to acknowledge that there is a God simply on the ground that he perceives no evidence for his existence and finds the arguments which have been advanced in proof of it invalid. In this case his atheism is critical, not agnostic. The atheist may be, and not infrequently is, an agnostic.
Robert Flint
I have a head for business and a body for sin. Unfortunately, the sin appears to be gluttony.
Jenny Colgan
With the magnificence of eternity before us, let time, with all its fluctuations, dwindle into its own littleness.
Thomas Chalmers
I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.
Sara Sheridan
Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble.
William Drummond
He stopped at an intersection, panting, rubbing at the twinge in his hamstrings, looking around, though he knew no cars were coming in either direction.Dropping forward at the waist Martin admitted that he was fucking himself up. Dr Leonowsky told him: hurting yourself is an articulation of self-disgust. It helps no one, prevents nothing. This wasn’t a glorious loss of control, he was fooling himself, it was self-harm.
Denise Mina
Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.
William Barclay
She was simply a young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a real person, such as those represent him who profess to have known him; and she therefore believed the man himself—believed that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he, the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all.
George MacDonald
In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.
Iain M. Banks
Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful: but in our age of Downpulling and Disbelief, the very Devil has been pulled down, you cannot so much as believe in a Devil. To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.
Thomas Carlyle
I am a beast until I love as God doth love.
George MacDonald
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
The Jock Upstart, is what Wellington calls - called me. A man who does not know his allotted place in the scheme of things.
Marguerite Kaye
here is nothing which any way pertains to the the worship of God left to the determination of human laws, besides the mere circumstances, which neither have any holiness in them, forasmuch as they have no other use and praise in sacred than which have in civil things, nor yet were particularly determinable in Scripture.
George Gillespie
I don't know what being in love with someone is supposed to feel like," Tyler admits with a breathy laugh, "but if being in love means thinking about someone every second of every day... If being in love means your entire mood shifts when they're around... If being in love means you'd do anything and everything for them," he murmurs, "then I am endlessly in love with you.
Estelle Maskame
Love me, beloved; Hades and DeathShall vanish away like a frosty breath;These hands, that now are at home in thine,Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine;And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride,In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide,If the truest love thy heart can knowMeet the truest love that from mine can flow.Pray God, beloved, for thee and me,That our souls may be wedded eternally
George MacDonald
Some things belong to the past.
Ronald Frame
The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality.
Oswald Chambers
Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.
Adam Smith
Beware of surrender that is motivated by personal benefits that may result.
Oswald Chambers
She picked up the stout and took a sip. It slid down her throat like silk.
Sara Sheridan
...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
Iain Banks
I write to escape. I haven't managed it yet, but I'm working on it
William Meikle
Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man, but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.
Thomas Carlyle
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
We must go on, because we can't turn back.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Once you bid farewell to discipline you say goodbye to success
Alex Ferguson
It’s ridiculous – a girl steps out, goes dancing, gets her hair cut, decides to spend the summer in Italy and it’s a scandal. A chap does it and no one bats an eyelid.
Sara Sheridan
Nothing is more usual than for philosophers to encroach upon the province of grammarians; and to engage in disputes of words, while they imagine that they are handling controversies of the deepest importance and concern.
David Hume
Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Our greatest good and what we least can spare is hope.
John Armstrong
There has seldom if ever a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.
Iain Banks
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
It occurred to me that as a man I could do anything, everything I wanted.
Sara Sheridan
...he believed in God and he believed that when the human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own.
George MacDonald
Lately Mirabelle had reflected wistfully if people even noticed her – a smartly dressed woman who came and went along the Promenade, always alone.
Sara Sheridan
Edinburgh is a great big black bastard of a city where there are ghosts of all kinds.
Sara Sheridan
We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.
George MacDonald
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
Whenever we put other things first, there is confusion.
Oswald Chambers
I have resolved that from this day on I will do all the business I can honestly have all the fun I can reasonably do all the good I can willingly and save my digestion by thinking pleasantly.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Gin a body meet a bodyComing thro' the rye,Gin a body kiss a body— Need a body cry?
Robert Burns