Walter Scott Quotes

The time which passes over our heads so imperceptibly makes the same gradual change in habits, manners and character, as in personal appearance. At the revolution of every five years we find ourselves another and yet the same;
there is a change of views, and no less of the light in which we regard them; a change of motives as well as of action.

What is a diary as a rule? A document useful to the person who keeps it. Dull to the contemporary who reads it and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Thus aged men, full loth and slow, The vanities of life forego, And count their youthful follies o'er, Till Memory lends her light no more.

A sound head, an honest heart, and an humble spirit are the three best guides through time and to eternity.

Hunger and fear are excellent casuists.

Cats are a mysterious kind of folk. There is more passing in their minds than we are aware of.

he was too proud a man to be a vain one.

Mr. Sampson, you forget the difference between Plato and Zenocrates.

There is more sense in your language, Bucklaw," replied the Master, "than might have been expected from your conduct - it is too true, our vices steal upon us in forms outwardly fair as those of the demons whom the superstitious represent as intriguing with the human race, and are not discovered in their native hideousness until we have clasped them in our arms.

Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives! Fight on; death is better than defeat! Fight on brave knights! for bright eyes behold your deeds!

But I would have vengeance to fall on the head, not on the hand; on the tyrannical and oppressive government which designed and directed these premeditated and reiterated insults, not on the tools of office which they employed in the execution of the injuries they designed you.

Methinks I will not die quite happy without having seen something of that Rome of which I have read so much.

...[T]o restrain [evil men] by their sense of humanity is the same as to stop a runaway horse with a bridle of silk thread.

Colonel Talbot? he is a very disagreeable person, to be sure. He looks as if he thought no Scottish woman worth the trouble of handing her a cup of tea.

Of all vices, drinking is the most incompatible with greatness.

In prosperous times I have sometimes felt my fancy and powers of language flag, but adversity is to me at least a tonic and bracer.

Faces that have charmed us the most escape us the soonest.

That day of wrath, that dreadful day. When heaven and earth shall pass away.

The worst evil which befalls our race is, that when we are wronged and plundered, all the world laughs around, and we are compelled to suppress our sense of injury, and to smile tamely, when we would revenge bravely.

It is a great disgrace to religion, to imagine that it is an enemy to mirth and cheerfulness, and a severe exacter of pensive looks and solemn faces.

I was not always a man of woe.

A thousand fearful images and dire suggestions glance along the mind when it is moody and discontented with itself. Command them to stand and show themselves, and you presently assert the power of reason over imagination.

There never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in the character which is a stranger to resolute self-denial.

Saint George and the Dragon!-Bonny Saint George for Merry England!-The castle is won!

Great talent has always a little madness mixed up with it.

God of Jacob! it is the meeting of two fierce tides - the conflict of two oceans moved by adverse winds!

War is the only game in which both sides lose.

Lawyer's anxiety about the fate of the most interesting cause has seldom spoiled either his sleep or digestion.

See yonder rock from which the fountain gushes; is it less compact of adamant, though waters flow from it? Firm hearts have moister eyes.

Thou and I are but the blind instruments of some irresistible fatality, that hurries us along, like ships driving before the storm, which are dashed against each other, and so perish

He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obstacles.

Nothing could be more gracefully majestic than his step and manner, had they not been marked by a predominant air of haughtiness, easily acquired by the exercise of unresisted authority.

And ne er did Grecian chisel trace A Nymph, a naiad or a grace Of finer form or lovelier face ...

The sickening pang of hope deferr'd.

Far better was our homely diet, eaten in peace and liberty, than the luxurious dainties, the love of which hath delivered us as bondsmen to the foreign conqueror!

Honour is a homicide and a bloodspiller, that gangs about making frays in the street; but Credit is a decent honest man, that sits at hame and makes the pat play.

Will future ages believe that such stupid bigotry ever existed!

Great God! hast Thou given men Thine own image that it should be thus cruelly defaced by the hands of their brethren!

Like the dew on the mountain, like the foam on the river, like the bubble on the fountain, thou art gone, and for ever!

There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.

To augment their misery, a contagious disorder of a dangerous nature spread through the land; and, rendered more virulent by the uncleanness, the indifferent food, and the wretched lodging of the lower classes, swept off many whose fate the survivors were tempted to envy, as exempting them from the evils which were to come.

Heaven know its time; the bullet has its billet

It has often been remarked of the Scottish character, that the stubbornness with which it is moulded shows most to advantage in adversity, when it seems akin to the native sycamore of their hills, which scorns to be biassed in its mode of growth even by the influence of the prevailing wind, but, shooting its branches with equal boldness in every direction, shows no weather-side to the storm, and may be broken, but can never be bended.

Godfrey Bertram of Ellangowan succeeded to a long pedigree and a short rent-roll, like many lairds of that period.

Lucy Ashton, in short, was involved in those mazes of the imagination which are most dangerous to the young and the sensitive. Time, it is true, absence, change of place and of face, might probably have destroyed the illusion in her instance as it has done in many others.

Are ye come light-handed, ye son of a toom whistle?

You will, I trust, resemble a forest plant, which has indeed, by some accident, been brought up in the greenhouse, and thus rendered delicate and effeminate, but which regains its native firmness and tenacity, when exposed for a season to the winter air.

Necessity
thou best of peacemakers, As well as surest prompter of invention.

Threatened folk live long.

No scene of mortal life but teems with mortal woe.

Love rules the court, the camp, the grove, and men below, and the saints above, for love is heaven, and heaven is love.

Steady of heart and stout of hand.

Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances!
Honored and blessed be the ever-green Pine!
Long may the tree, in his banner that glances,
Flourish, the shelter and grace of our line!
Heaven send it happy dew,
Earth lend it sap anew,
Gayly to bourgeon and broadly to grow,
While every Highland glen
Sends our shout back again,
'Roderigh Vich Alpine dhu, ho! ieroe!

Once upon a time there lived an old woman, called Janet Gellatley, who was suspected to be a witch, on the infallible grounds that she was very old, very ugly, very poor, and had two sons, one of whom was a poet, and the other a fool, which visitation, all the neighbourhood agreed, had come upon her for the sin of witchcraft.

Courtesy of tongue," said Rowena, "when it is used to veil churlishness of deed, is but a knight's girdle around the breast of a base clown.["]

Recollect that the Almighty, who gave the dog to be companion of our pleasures and our toils, hath invested him with a nature noble and incapable of deceit.

he acquired a more complete mastery of a spirit tamed by adversity, than his former experience had given him; and that he felt himself entitled to say firmly, though perhaps with a sigh, that the romance of his life was ended, and that its real history had now commenced. He was soon called upon to justify his pretensions to reason and philosophy.

Although too much of a soldier among sovereigns, no one could claim with better right to be a sovereign among soldiers.

Where shall he find, in foreign land,
So lone a lake, so sweet a strand!
There is no breeze upon the fern,
No ripple on the lake,
Upon her eyry nods the erne,
The deer has sought the brake;
The small birds will not sing aloud,
The springing trout lies still,
So darkly glooms yon thunder-cloud,
That swathes, as with a purple shroud

God in his goodness sent the grapes
To cheer both great and small;
Little fools will drink too much
And great fools none at all!

So faithful in love, and so dauntless in war, There never was knight like young Lochinvar.

Wounds sustained for the sake of conscience carry their own balsam with the blow.

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

And children know,
Instinctive taught, the friend and foe.

there are stratagems in law as well as war.

Love, to her ear, was but a name,
Combin'd with vanity and shame;
Her hopes, her fears, her joys, were all
Bounded within the cloister wall.

Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land.

Good even, good fair moon, good even to thee. I prithee, dear moon, now show to me the form and the features, the speech and degree, of the man that true lover of mine shall be.

Profan'd the God-given strength, and marr'd the lofty line.

Chivalry!
why, maiden, she is the nurse of pure and high affection
the stay of the oppressed, the redresser of grievances, the curb of the power of the tyrant
Nobility were but an empty name without her, and liberty finds the best protection in her lance and her sword.

My hope, my heaven, my trust must be,
My gentle guide, in following thee.

"Charge, Chester, charge! on, Stanley, on!" Were the last words of Marmion.

He turn'd his charger as he spake, Upon the river shore, He gave his bridle reins a shake, Said, "Adieu for evermore, my love, And adieu for evermore."

Treason seldom dwells with courage.

Lightly from fair to fair he flew, And loved to plead, lament, and sue; Suit lightly won, and short-lived pain, For monarchs seldom sigh in vain.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honour or observation.

Come fill up my cup, come fill up my can, Come saddle your horses, and call up your men; Come open the West Port, and let me gang free, And it's room for the bonnets of Bonny Dundee!

All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.

Woman's faith and woman's trust, Write the characters in dust.

Harp of the North, farewell! The hills grow dark,
On purple peaks a deeper shade descending;
In twilight copse the glow-worm lights her spark,
The deer, half seen, are to the covert wending.
Resume thy wizard elm! the fountain lending,
And the wild breeze, thy wilder minstrelsy;
Thy numbers sweet with nature's vespers blending,
With distant echo from the fold and lea,
And herd-boy's evening pipe, and hum of housing bee.

Earth walks on Earth, Glittering in gold; Earth goes to Earth, Sooner than it wold; Earth builds on Earth, Palaces and towers; Earth says to Earth, Soon, all shall be ours.

The chain of friendship, however bright, does not stand the attrition of constant close contact.

Merrily, merrily goes the bark On a breeze from the northward free, So shoots through the morning sky the lark, Or the swan through the summer sea.

Is death the last sleep? No, it is the last and final awakening.

One or two of these scoundrel statesmen should be shot once a-year, just to keep the others on their good behavior.

Blud's thicker than water.

As he offered to advance, she exclaimed, Remain where thou art, proud Templar, or at thy choice advance!
one foot nearer, and I plunge myself from the precipice; my body shall be crushed out of the very form of humanity upon the stones of that courtyard ere it become the victim of thy brutality!

The heart-sick faintness of the hope delayed!

All is possible for those who dare to die!

Loud o'er my head though awful thunders roll, And vivid lightnings flash from pole to pole, Yet 'tis Thy voice, my God, that bids them fly, Thy arm directs those lightnings through the sky. Then let the good Thy mighty name revere, And hardened sinners Thy just vengeance fear.

And my father!-oh, my father! evil is it with his daughter, when his grey hairs are not remembered because of the golden locks of youth!

I am she, O most bucolical juvenal, under whose charge are placed the milky mothers of the herd.

Hurry no man's cattle; you may come to own a donkey yourself

And see ye not that braid braid road
That lies across that lily leven?
That is the path of wickedness
Though some call it the road to heaven

Now, it is well known, that a man may with more impunity be guilty of an actual breach either of real good breeding or of good morals, than appear ignorant of the most minute point of fashionable etiquette.

A Christmas gambol oft could cheer
The poor man's heart through half the year.

And please return it. You may think this a strange request, but I find that although my friends are poor arithmeticians, they are nearly all of them good bookkeepers.

Those who are too idle to read, save for the purpose of amusement, may in these works acquire some acquaintance with history, which, however inaccurate, is better than none.

November's sky is chill and drear, November's leaf is red and sear.

Look not thou on beauty's charming;
Sit thou still when kings are arming;
Taste not when the wine-cup glistens;
Speak not when the people listens