Let us do or die.
Robert Burns - Bannockburn.

My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not
here;
My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the
deer;
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains high cover’d with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.
Robert Burns.

Love of the land, of its proud capital city, of its country places, and islands remote and mysterious, is a strong vein in the Scot. He is the son of a hundred generations of warriors, and worships the chivalrous kings and fair queens and witty bards of bygone years and the lost causes and forlorn hopes and red defeats and hardships
that fill the most precious pages of their story, nor is the ancient spirit of their fortitude and chivalry fled. Empire and the Great War are witnesses to that, and the Scottish soul dares yet wilder dreams of chivalry beyond all that ever was or can be, and stands fast for Freedom still, “though e’er sae puir,” ready to welcome Pain and many a stark renunciation.
W. H. Hamilton.

In the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens
Quiet eyes. . .
R. L. Stevenson.

Name not the land where the olive tree grows,
Nor the land of the Shamrock, nor land of the Rose;
But show me the Thistle that waves its proud head,
Over heroes whose blood for their country was shed!
Andrew Park.

For, as long as but ane hundred of us remain alive, never
will we on any conditions be brought under English rule.
It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.
from the Declaration of Arbroath [1320]

Mid the rays of summer weather,
Sweetly blooms the mountain heather;
Love and beauty sport together,
Bonnie, bonnie Scotland!

Bonnie Scotland, I adore thee!
Now I wander gladly o’er thee,
Thy enchantments will restore me,
Bonnie, bonnie Scotland!
Charles Blamphin.

“Over the hills and far away”
That is the tune I heard one day
When heather-drowsy I lay and listened
And watched where the stealthy sea-tide glistened.
Fiona MacLeod.

This is my country,
The land that begat me,
These windy spaces
Are surely my own.
And those who here toil
In the sweat of their faces
Are flesh of my flesh,
And bone of my bone.
Alexander Gray.

O Sing to me the auld Scots sangs,
In the braid Scottish tongue,
The sangs my father loved to hear,
The sangs my mither sung
When she sat beside my cradle
Or croon’d me on her knee,
And I wadna sleep, she sang sac sweet
The auld Scots sangs to me.
Dr. Bethune.

I like to tell people when they ask "Are you a native born?" "No sir, I am a Scotsman" and I feel as proud as I am sure every Roman did when it was their boast to say "I am a Roman citizen"
Andrew Carnegie

"There is no sunlight in the poetry of exile. There is only mist, wind, rain, the cry of the curlew and the slow clouds above damp moorland. That is the real Scotland; that is the Scotland whose memory rings the withers of the far-from-home; and, in some way that is mysterious, that is the Scotland that even a stranger learns to love".
H V Morton.

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled;
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to you gory bed,
Or to victory!
Robert Burns- Bruce to His Men at Bannockburn.

My dear, my native soil!
For whom my warmest wish to Heav'n is sent,
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil
Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content!
Robert Burns- Cotter's Saturday Night.

The Scots cannot endure to hear their country or
Countrymen spoken against.
John Ray

It's away and away o’er the waves I’d be,
With the gull in her flight;
For a little lone isle in the Western Sea
Is calling to me, to-night.

I’m hearing the tumbling streams that flow
Through the haunts of the bee;
By the winding tracks where the children go,
And by green graves low, by the sea.
L. MacLean Watt.

But it is in June, I think, that the mountain charm is most
intoxicating. The airs are lightsome. The hill-mists are
seldom heavy, and only on south-wind mornings do the
lovely grey-white vapours linger among the climbing
corries and overhanging scarps. Many of the slopes are
blue, aerially delicate, from the incalculable myriad host
of the bluebells. The green of the bracken is more
wonderful than at any other time. When the wind plays
upon it the rise and fall is as the breathing of the green
seas among the caverns of Mingulay or among the savage rock-pools of the Seven Hunters or where the Summer Isles lie in the churn of the Atlantic tides. Everything is alive in joy. The young broods exult. The air is vibrant with the eddies of many wings, great and small. The shadow-grass sways with the passage of the shrewmouse or the wing’s-breath of the darting swallow. The stillest pool quivers, for among the shadows of breathless reeds the phantom javelin of the dragon-fly whirls for a second from silence to silence.
William Sharp: ‘Fiona Macleod’

He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all.
James Graham, Marquis of Montrose

For that is the mark of the Scot of all classes: that he
stands in an attitude towards the past unthinkable to
Englishmen, and remembers and cherishes the memory
of his forbears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him
a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth
generation.
Robert Louis Stevenson

‘Tell me about Scotland and yourself,’ said the Princess.
‘Tell me your stories and sing me your songs.’
The Prince sulked and looked at the floor.
‘There is too much to tell,’ he said.
‘I have time enough to listen,’ she said. ‘A thousand years if need be.’
‘That may not be enough,’ he muttered into his chest.
‘And you know that I have an open mind and a warm
heart,’ she said, laying a jewelled hand on his sleeve.
The Prince raised his head.
‘I fear you will need both,’ he said, and began his story.
The Bydand Myths.

On a fine morning there is not in the whole world a prettier sheet of water than Loch Eishart. Everything about it is wild, beautiful, and lonely. You drink a strange and unfamiliar air. You seem to be sailing out of the nineteenth century away back into the ninth. You are delighted, and there is rio remembered delight with which you can compare the feeling. Over the Loch the Cuchullins rise crested with tumult of golden mists; the shores are green behind; and away out, towards the horizon, the Island of Rum, ten miles long at the least, shoots up from the flat sea like a pointed flame. It is a granite mass, you know, firm as the foundations of the world; but as you gaze the magic of morning light makes it a glorious apparition, a mere crimson film or shadow. .
Beyond Rum, fifteen miles out yonder, the sea is smooth, and flushed with more varied hues than ever lived on the changing opal, dim azures, tender pinks, sleek emeralds. It is one sheet of mother-of-pearl. The hills are silent. . . . But the sea, literally clad with birds, is vociferous.
Alexander Smith.