Walter Scott's Quotes

To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors.

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

What I have to say is far more important than how long my eyelashes are.

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 honor or observation.

The half hour between waking and rising has all my life proved propitious to any task which was exercising my invention... It was always when I first opened my eyes that the desired ideas thronged upon me.

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.

Look back, and smile on perils past.

O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!

For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.

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

Success or failure in business is caused more by the mental attitude even than by mental capacities.

Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.

Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.

Many miles away there's a shadow on the door of a cottage on the Shore of a dark Scottish lake.

We build statues out of snow, and weep to see them melt.

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

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

Unless a tree has borne blossoms in spring, you will vainly look for fruit on it in autumn.

A rusty nail placed near a faithful compass, will sway it from the truth, and wreck the argosy.

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

O! many a shaft, at random sent, Finds mark the archer little meant! And many a word, at random spoken, May soothe or wound a heart that's broken!