Quotes by Scottish Authors - Page 7

The Gospel is not a mere message of deliverance, but a canon of conduct; it is not a theology to be accepted, but it is ethics to be lived. It is not to be believed only, but it is to be taken into life as a guide.
Alexander MacLaren
And they all lived happily ever after, until they died.
Ali Smith
All worlds of fiction are alternative realities.
Hal Duncan
I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.
Sara Sheridan
The present is the living sum-total of the whole past.
Thomas Carlyle
Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work in hand. The Sun's rays do not burn until brought to a focus
Alexander Graham Bell
Joy has nothing to do with material things or with a man's outward circumstance ... a man living in the lap of luxury can be wretched and a man in the depths of poverty can overflow with joy.
William Barclay
In the ghetto of Genre, anything goes, man. When you live in the gutter it doesn’t matter if you’re filthy. In theory anyway.
Hal Duncan
The prudent man always studies seriously and earnestly to understand whatever he professes to understand, and not merely to persuade other people that he understands it; and though his talents may not always be very brilliant, they are always perfectly genuine
Adam Smith
He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat
Sara Sheridan
If you're not at the front, you're not in the race.
David Millar
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
Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw.
George MacDonald
Concentrate your energies your thoughts and your capital. ... The wise man puts all his eggs in one basket and watches the basket.
Andrew Carnegie
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot
Over the drop, a luminous pond lay below them like a pale magic lantern. It was as if the moon had plummeted into the water and smashed open. Engulfed in darkness, with only a scatter of stars above, the place felt like a bright secret – something ancient and precious.
Sara Sheridan
Speech is silvern silence is golden.
Thomas Carlyle
[I]t must be owned, that liberty is the perfection of civil society; but still authority must be acknowledged essential to its very existence: and in those contests, which so often take place between the one and the other, the latter may, on that account, challenge the preference. Unless perhaps one may say (and it may be said with some reason) that a circumstance, which is essential to the existence of civil society, must always support itself, and needs be guarded with less jealousy, than one that contributes only to its perfection, which the indolence of men is so apt to neglect, or their ignorance to overlook.
David Hume
But I find it necessary to repeat in this particular place that the division into classes, which is so salient a part of modern demonology, had, and has, little significance for primitive man or for the peasant in a comparatively low state of mental development. To such people, spirits of all kinds - fairies, the ghosts of the dead, and even witches and water-kelpies - are all creatures of the supernatural class between which he scarcely differentiates.
Lewis Spence
It is of great advantage to the student of any subject to read the original memoirs on that subject, for science is always most completely assimilated when it is in the nascent state...
James Clerk Maxwell
The look you get when you’re reading in your van, and your feet are up and you sit so still, and your face is alight, and I don’t know where you are; you could be anywhere, so far away, off in a part of your mind I’ll never get to . . . It drives me crazy. The way you just came here, just got up, changed your entire life . . . I mean, my family’s been here for four generations. It would never have occurred to me to do what you did, just to start over and do something different. Amazing.
Jenny Colgan
The devil was always in the detail. And here the detail was certainly devilish.
Sara Sheridan
It was in love I was created, and in love is how I hope I die
Paolo Nutini
If you're suddenly doing something you don't want to do for four years, just so you've got something to fall back on, by the time you come out you don't have that 16-year-old drive any more and you'll spend your life doing something you never wanted to do in the first place.
Ewan McGregor
It is the heart that is unsure of its God that is afraid to laugh.
George MacDonald
Truth in spirit, not truth to the letter, is the true veracity,
Robert Louis Stevenson
Every time we pray our horizon is altered our attitude to things is altered not sometimes but every time and the amazing thing is that we don't pray more.
Oswald Chambers
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
The purpose of prayer is to reveal the presence of God equally present all the time in every condition.
Oswald Chambers
Here then we are first to consider a book, presented to us by a barbarous and ignorant people, written in an age when they were still more barbarous, and in all probability long after the facts which it relates, corroborated by no concurring testimony, and resembling those fabulous accounts, which every nation gives of its origin.
David Hume
[A]nd you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestow
Thomas Guthrie
I wear a taint of rationing, that's all. I have the thready, ashamed look of a reduced person who assumes there is a worse reduction to come.
Morag Joss
A society gets the criminals it deserves.
Val McDermid
A library cannot be made all at once, any more than a house or a nation or a tree; they must all take time to grow, and so must a library. I wouldn't even know what books to go and ask for. I dare say, if I were to try, I couldn't at a moment's notice tell you the names of more than two score of books at the outside. Folk must make acquaintance among books as they would among living folk.
George MacDonald
In wartime people took action because of what they believed in. In peacetime people were driven by their private concerns.
Sara Sheridan
There is but one art to omit.
Robert Louis Stevenson
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
For marriage is like life in this—that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.
Robert Louis Stevenson
The race of mankind would perish did they cease to aid each other. We cannot exist without mutual help. All therefore that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow man and no one who has the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.
Sir Walter Scott
I'm drawn to the 1950s for lots of reasons - everything from the fashion to the increasing sense of freedom and modernity that builds throughout the decade.
Sara Sheridan
He must have courage, not the physical courage required on a battlefield but the moral courage to make and carry out decisions that might directly counter to the wishes of his superiors. He must have great willpower. and, perhaps above all, he must have the gift of leadership.
Alistair MacLean
Most fellas like the races, though, Miss. It’s only human nature
Sara Sheridan
As a novelist it is my job to tell stories that inspire and entertain but I am increasingly mindful that many of these historical tales (which of themselves are fascinating) relate directly to our issues in society today.
Sara Sheridan
Thus unto winter’s chill embrace I turnWho once the summer’s sun did blithely bide ‘Neath solemn visage cold and fair and sternIn her cool breast my hot heart to confide.Denied the warmth and wit of summer’s sun Or springtime’s strength, and bright, melodious song I dreamed not to complete what I’d begun Nor dared to haste the laggard hours along.But now with spring and summer sun at rest Laid bare before bright winter’s pale charms I would for love of her lay down my quest And take my ease in Winter-Lady’s arms.Before her beauty fair ‘neath snow-swept sky All other seasons blanch and fade, and die.- The Lost Knight's Lament, "Winter's Lady" (Forthcoming)
D. Alexander Neill
Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn't matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.
Craig Ferguson
Prayer is a rising up and a drawing near to God in mind and in heart and in spirit.
Alexander Whyte
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.
Sir Walter Scott
There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace--this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table--this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God.
George MacDonald
It's so warm it's almost friendly. A friendly work of art. I've never thought such a thing in my life. And look at it. It's never sentimental. It's generous, but it's sardonic too. And whenever it's sardonic, a moment later it's generous again.
Ali Smith
If the newspapers begin to publish stories about wars, and the people begin to think and talk of war in their daily conversations, they soon find themselves at war. People get that which their minds dwell upon, and this applies to a group or community or a nation of people, the same as to an individual
Andrew Carnegie
Procrastination is the kidnapper of souls, and the recruiting-officer of Hell.
Edward Irving
Let us do or die.
James Drummond Burns
Well at ease are the Sleepers for whom Existence is a shallow Dream.
Thomas Carlyle
There's that horrible-beautiful moment, that bitter-sweet impasse where you know that somebody is bullshitting you but they're doing it with such panache and conviction...no, it's because they say exactly what you want to hear, at that point in time.
Irvine Welsh
A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.
George MacDonald
This world, for aught he knows, is very faulty and imperfect, compared to a superior standard; and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity, who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance: it is the work only of some dependent, inferior deity; and is the object of derision to his superiors: it is the production of old age and dotage in some superannuateddeity; and ever since his death, has run on at adventures, from the first impulse and active force which it received from him.
David Hume
For God's sake give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself.
Robert Louis Stevenson
There is something about the very idea of a city which is central to the understanding of a planet like Earth, and particularly the understanding of that part of the then-existing group-civilization which called itself the West. That idea, to my mind, met its materialist apotheosis in Berlin at the time of the
Iain M. Banks
The moon was low but not full. The men set out along the dock in conversation. As they dropped onto the dark beach, Simmons declared, ‘There can be no better place in the world than this.’Henderson had to agree. The beach was beautiful. The stars lit the sand and balmy air rode in as the waves washed up on paradise
Sara Sheridan
We had laid down the law : no chocolate, no sex.
Sara Sheridan