Best 288 quotes of Alexander Mccall Smith on MyQuotes

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

All suspects should be given the chance to telephone their lawyers or their mothers, and it would not be surprising if they chose to call their mothers. After all, your mother is fall more likely to believe in your innocence than your lawyer.

A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.

And if there's bad behaviour," Mma Potokwane went on. "If there's bad behaviour, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love. That always works, you know. People say we must punish when there is wrongdoing, but if you punish you're only punishing yourself. And what's the point of that?

And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand?

And the memory made her humble; for we should not forget what it is to be young and to have ideas and attitudes that may later seem so fanciful.

And then the second thing you have to do is go and see your son. That is a duty of love, Andrew. It's as simple as that. A duty of love. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?

Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was.

A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing is impossible--if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart--most of us do, in one way or another.

Are we facing a new Dark Age, Angus? Possibly, Lou. A dark age in which our concentration spell is this long.

A society that undermined its teachers and their authority only dug away at its own sure foundations.

A traditional house smelled of wood smoke, the earth, and of thatch; all good smells, the smell of life itself.

Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl's fun.

bureaucracy was very rarely an obstruction, provided that one applied to it the insights of ordinary, everyday psychology

...But although the rules are vague And widely disregarded now Some precepts remain: live with love - That is a rule we all can understand; Forgive those who need forgiveness, Which I think is everybody, more or less; Be kind - that, perhaps, is first and foremost In any postmodern, new-fangled Code we devise for ourselves; Yes, be kind: love one another, And most of all tend with gentleness The small patch of terra firma That is allocated to each of us...

...But I do like the idea of household gods--shall we get some? A set of little statues and bring the boys up to believe in them?" "I hope they believe in something," said Elspeth. 'Imagaine believing in nothing at all--not even in love, or justice, or any of the things that can make people passionate." "Such as a country?" Elspeth thought about this. "I suppose there are lots of people who believe in Scotland. Or the European Union, for that matter. Their belief anables them to ... well, to talk about the future with enthusiasm. They don't like things as they are and they are convinced that things will be much improved once they are otherwise." "Well, why not?" asked Matthew. "I didn't say there was any reason why not. I'm just commenting on that sort of belief. The trouble is that it might make discussion difficult. If somebody believes to strongly in one particular solution to the world's problems, then it may obscure the nuances. That's all I was saying." Elspeth paused. "They may not see that there are others who have a different view. You can love things in a whole lot of different ways, can't you?

Can you forgive her? Can you do that? There was no response. Because if you can start to forgive, then it will become easier. And? And then you will be able to forgive yourself—and ask others to forgive you.

Chapter Eleven She did not spend long in the supermarket at Riverwalk, confining her purchases to supplies she would need for the next few days. There was beef for stew, a large pumpkin, a packet of beans, a dozen eggs, and two loaves of bread. The pumpkin looked delicious—almost perfectly round and deep yellow in colour, it sat on the passenger seat beside her so comfortably as she drove out of the car park, so pleased to be what it was, that she imagined conducting a conversation with it, telling it about the Orphan Farm and Mma Potokwane and her concerns over Mma Makutsi. And the pumpkin would remain silent, of course, but would somehow indicate that it knew what she was talking about, that there were similar issues in the world of pumpkins. She smiled. There was no harm, she thought, in allowing your imagination to run away with you, as a child’s will do, because the thoughts that came in that way could be a comfort, a relief in a world that could be both sad and serious. Why not imagine a talk with a pumpkin? Why not imagine going off for a drive with a friendly pumpkin, a companion who would not, after all, answer back; who would agree with everything you said, and would at the end of the day appear on your plate as a final gesture of friendship? Why not allow yourself a few minutes of imaginative silliness so that you could remember what it was like when you believed such things, when you were a child at the feet of your grandmother, listening to the old Setswana tales of talking trees and clever baboons and all the things that made up that world that lay just on the other side of the world we knew, the world of the real Botswana. Mma Ramotswe

..."Charming people, when not actively shooting one another," a friend had once said, which was so unkind, but, like so many unkind comments, had a grain of truth in it. They did shoot one another and had been doing so for centuries. They did bicker over and brood on long-dead history--or history that should be long dead. The problem with history was that it refused to lie down and die.

Class reunions were about curiosity; about satisfaction at the avoidance of the mistakes of one’s contemporaries, now revealed in their emerging life histories; about reflecting on the ravages—and injustices—of time; and of realizing, perhaps, how strange and random are the twists and turns of fate.

Dear friends, he began, there is no timetable for happiness; it moves, I think, according to rules of its own. When I was a boy I thought I'd be happy tomorrow, as a young man I thought it would be next week; last month I thought it would be never. Today, I know it is now. Each of us, I suppose has at least one person who thinks that our manifest faults are worth ignoring; I have found mine, and am content. When we are far from home we think of home; I, who am happy today, think of those in Scotland for whom such happiness might seem elusive; may such powers as listen to what is said by people like me, in olive groves like this, grant to those who want a friendship a friend, attend to the needs of those who have little, hold the hand of those who are lonely, allow Scotland, our place, our country, to sing in the language of her choosing that song she has always wanted to sing, which is of brotherhood, which is of love.

…did it make a difference if the remark never got back to the person about whom it was made? She thought not. The harm is done when the words are uttered: that is the act of belittlement, the act of diminishing the other, and it is that act which would cause pain to the victim. You said that about me? The wrong was located in the making of the cruel remark, rather than in the pain it might later cause.

Dieting was cruel; it was an abuse of human rights. Yes, that's what it was, and she should not allow herself to be manipulated in this way. She stopped herself. Thinking like that was nothing more than coming up with excuses for breaking the diet. Mma Ramotswe was made of sterner stuff than that, and so she persisted.

Dogs can read signals -- look at sheepdogs; they understand hand movements for left and right. Dogs are no fools, you know." He paused. "Well, some are. Some dogs are truly stupid, Ulf.

Do I shock you? I think I do. That’s the problem these days – nobody speaks their mind. No, don’t smile. They really don’t. We’ve been browbeaten into conformity by all sorts of people who tell us what we can and cannot say. Haven’t you noticed it? The tyranny of political correctness. Don’t pass any judgement on anything. Don’t open your trap in case you offend somebody or other.

...each of us needed to find just the right way to take our mind off our problems, and it did not matter what that was--a drive in the country, an expedition to a shoe shop, a quiet cup of tea under a cloudless sky; each of us had something that made it easier to continue in a world that sometimes, just sometimes, was not as we might wish it to be.

Everybody in a village had a role to play in bringing up a child—and cherishing it—and in return that child would in due course feel responsible for everybody in that village. That is what makes life in society possible. We must love one another and help one another in our daily lives. That was the traditional African way and there was no substitute for it. None.

Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else.

For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic.

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.

Has anyone sen Mr Snark " "I saw him in the tunnel about 15 minutes ago." "Oh no " wailed Dr Ferman "he will have been atomised." "Oh dear" muttered an MP. "Bye-election.

He evidently did not care that they were in full view of a cluster of dog-owners walking their dogs. He stopped and took her in his arms, kissing her passionately and urgently.

He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.

He had often noticed how important was the phrase good dog in human interaction with dogs. People commonly used it when meeting a dog for the first time-they would bend down, pat the dog on the head, and say "Good dog." Why they should do this was not altogether clear: we do not give moral compliments to other people or creatures we meet-who says "Good cat" when introduced to somebody's cat? That was strange. Perhaps it was because so few cats were good, one view indeed being that cats were inherently psychopathic. They were prepared to engage with humans but only in so far as it suited them to do so; beyond that, such affection as they showed for humans was a calculating cupboard love or, at most, a passing, almost pitying scrap of recognition, withdrawn at the blink of an eyelid.

He is a good, kind man,” said Mma Potokwane. “And such men are often too busy. I have noticed that round here too. That man I was talking to just then—one of our groundsmen—he is like that. He is so kind that everybody asks him to do everything. We had a bad-tempered man working here once and he had nothing to do because nobody, apart form myself, of course, had the courage to ask him to do anything.

He smiled as he imagined the composite Jamie/Isabel, who would play the bassoon, read philosophy, interfere in other people's affairs rather too much, drive a green Swedish car and make legendary potatoes Dauphinoise.

He thought of all the ways that so many people felt about life. Life was a matter of regret--how could it be anything else? We knew that we would lose the things we loved; we knew that sooner or later we would lose everything, and beyond that was a darkness, a state of non-being that we found hard to imagine, let alone accept.

He will be a small man inside," said Mma Ramotswe. "He will feel small and unimportant. That is why he needs to put ladies down, Mma. Men who are big inside never feel the need to do that.

He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes--not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general--at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.

His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.

However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicable Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…

How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?

Human history seems to me to be one long story of people sweeping down—or up, I suppose—replacing other people in the process.

I am blessed and being blessed is something more than just having something. It is a state of mind in which the good of the world is illuminated, it's understood. It is as if one is vouchsafed a vision of some sort, a vision of love, of 'agape', of the essential value of each and every living thing.

If she was going to remain an engaged lady, then she would make the most of it, and one of the ways to do this would be to enjoy her free time.

If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who only had a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.

If you did not keep your yard in reasonable order, then your whole life would be similarly untidy. A messy yard told Mma Ramotswe everything she needed to know about its owner.

I have a feeling that we've seen the dismantling of civilisation, brick by brick, and now we're looking into the void. We thought that we were liberating people from oppressive cultural circumstances, but we were, in fact, taking something away from them. We were killing off civility and concern. We were undermining all those little ties of loyalty and consideration and affection that are necessary for human flourishing. We thought that tradition was bad, that it created hidebound societies, that it held people down. But, in fact, what tradition was doing all along was affirming community and the sense that we are members of one another. Do we really love and respect one another more in the absence of tradition and manners and all the rest? Or have we merely converted one another into moral strangers - making our countries nothing more than hotels for the convenience of guests who are required only to avoid stepping on the toes of other guests?

I like you when you're algebraic," said Ulf--and immediately regretted it. It was a flirtatious remark--describing somebody as algebraic was undoubtedly to cross a line. You would not normally describe an ordinary friend as algebraic, and then say that you liked her that way.

In an earlier age, it might have been possible to believe that goodness would prevail over pride, but not anymore. The proud could be proud with impunity, because there was nobody to contradict him in his pride and because narcissism was no longer considered a vice. That was what the whole cult of celebrity was about, she thought; and we fêted these people and fed their vanity.