In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.
When I hear any man talk of an unalterable law, the only effect it produces on me is to convince me that he is an unalterable fool.
No man can ever end with being superior who will not begin with being inferior.
Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.
Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.
He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.
Scotland: That garret of the earth – that knuckle-end of England – that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulfur.
Some men have only one book in them, others a library.
Poverty is no disgrace to a man, but it is confoundedly inconvenient.
Great men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time.
When you rise in the morning, form a resolution to make the day a happy one for a fellow creature.
Politeness is good nature regulated by good sense.
Avoid shame, but do not seek glory; nothing so expensive as glory.
Take short views, hope for the best and trust in God.
The main question to a novel is – did it amuse? were you surprised at dinner coming so soon? did you mistake eleven for ten? were you too late to dress? and did you sit up beyond the usual hour? If a novel produces these effects, it is good; if it does not – story, language, love, scandal itself cannot save it. It is only meant to please; and it must do that or it does nothing.
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little; do something.
Never give way to melancholy: nothing encroaches more; I fight against it vigorously. One great remedy is, to take short views of life. Are you happy now? Are you likely to remain so till this evening? or next week? or next year? Then why destroy present happiness by a distant misery, which may never come at all, or you may never live to see it? For every substantial grief has twenty shadows, and most of them shadows of your own making.
Manners are the shadows of virtues; the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow-creatures love and respect. If we strive to become, then, what we strive to appear, manners may often be rendered useful guides to the performance of our duties.
Many in this world run after felicity like an absent man hunting for his hat, while all the time it is on his head or in his hand.
From the time when Scots ceased to be the official language of government, since King’s Scots had become King’s English, the lack of a central authority to promote a standard had meant the growth of a bastard Anglo-Scots as the general lingo of society.
When MacDiarmid spoke of “Synthetic Scots” he merely referred to another aspect of this necessary revolution; that we should forget the whole poverty-stricken “dialect” tradition that Burns and his immediate predecessors had been unconsciously responsible for, and use again all the rich resources of the language as Dunbar and the Makars had used it, as had Burns and Fergusson, Scott, Galt, Stevenson and George Douglas Brown.