Quotations About The Scots

I have been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am
obliged to desist from the experiment in despair.
Charles Lamb

You’ve forgotten the grandest moral attribute of a
Scotsman, Maggie, that he’ll do nothing which might
damage his career.
J. M. Barrie

In all my travels I never met any one Scotchman but what was a man of sense. I believe everybody of that country that has any, leaves it as fast as they can.
Thomas Lodge

I think being Scottish makes you very specific, you have a particular kind of distortion, like some kind of prism and
the light that comes through gets reflected in a special
way. The difficulty is to use the degree of distortion and
yet not end up in a cul-de-sac. Ideally the distortion
should lead you back out to where everybody else is
because everybody else must have had something like the same kind of things happening to them. I don’t think
being Scottish is either an enormous disadvantage or an
enormous advantage, but I do think being Scottish is a
very specific kind of existential event. I think I’m very
Scottish and I’m discovering each day how much more
Scottish I am. As the variety of apparent choices in life
open up to me, I realize how few of them are real choices. I just go on doing the things I always did and these things seem to be governed by my origins.
Alan Sharp

Among ourselves, the Scotch, as a nation, are particularly disagreeable. They hate every appearance of comfort themselves and refuse it to others. Their climate, their religion, and their habits are equally averse to pleasure. Their manners are either distinguished by a fawning sycophance (to gain their own ends, and conceal their natural defects), that makes one sick; or by a morose, unbending callousness, that makes one shudder.
William Hazlitt

The humid and penetrating atmosphere of Scotland had
for sometime affected me in a very disagreeable manner,
notwithstanding the active life I led. I found that the
mists, the frequent rains, the change of winds, the
sharpness of air, and the absence of the sun plunged me
into an involuntary melancholy, which I should not long
have been able to support.
Faujas de Saint-Fond

You Scots. . . are such a mixture of the practical and the
emotional that you escape out of an Englishman’s hand
like a trout.
J. M. Barrie

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman
with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
P. G. Wodehouse

There are few more impressive sights in the world than a
Scotsman on the make.
J. M. Barrie

An Englishman is a man who lives on an island in the
North Sea governed by Scotsmen.
Philip Guedalla

The Scottish towns are like none which I ever saw, either
in England, Wales, or Ireland: there is such an air of
antiquity in them all, and such a peculiar oddness in their
manner of building. But we were most surprised at the
entertainment we met with in every place, so far different from common report. We had all things good, cheap, in great abundance, and remarkably well dressed.
John Wesley

On the whole, I must say, I think the time we spent there was six weeks of the densest happiness I have ever met with in any part of my life; and the agreeable and instructive society there in such plenty has left so pleasing an impression on my memory, that, did not strong connections draw me elsewhere, I believe Scotland would be the country I should choose to spend the remainder of my days in.
Benjamin Franklin

The Scots are as diligent, as industrious, as apt for
Labour and Business, and as capable of it, when they are
abroad, as any People in the World; and why should they
not be so at Home? and, if they had Encouragement, no
doubt they would
Daniel Defoe

Last Sunday my review of Twelfth Night amazingly stated
that Sir Toby Belch is usually played as a ‘Scottish oaf’.
He is not. There are no Scottish oafs, It should have read, ‘sottish oaf’.
Harold Hobson (Sunday Times, 16.2.75)

The Scotch are proverbially poor and proud, we know
they can remedy their poverty when they set about it. No one is sorry for them.
William Hazlitt

The chief national characteristics of the Scotch are
constancy and unwearied perseverance. These qualities
have made that dreary and barren land a home of
prosperity, a flourishing paradise. Those who see with
envy that Scotchmen go anywhere, take to anything, are
always and everywhere happy, are in the habit of saying that you may bury a Scotchman in the bowels of Vesuvius and he will find a way out. It is meant for irony, but it is the greatest compliment that can be paid to a nation.
Labs Kossuth

A land of meanness, sophistry and lust.
Lord Byron

The English are polite and considerate. Other peoples are
more polite. Others are more considerate. But none
combines the two things so well, so generously and so
naturally. I am making a pilgrimage to London by tonight’s train. I hope to meet several Englishmen. None of them will, I think, really understand me or my nation and he will have no idea at all of our innermost thoughts, of what we reverence or to what we aspire. But I shall be disagreeably surprised if anybody treads on my toes
deliberately or punches my vaccination mark. If he does
he will certainly have Scots blood in his veins.
James Bridle

Scotsmen proceed everywhere; and wherever they are
found, they are esteemed for their probity and honour,
and are characterized by an energy which knows not how
to yield, and a determination which is invincible.
Rev. Charles Rogers

I suppose we are what we are because of the climate, or
Calvinism, or some racial inheritance — or even Dr
Gregory’s mixture. We’re damned thrawn, loyal to the
point of lunacy, lousy lovers, clumsy, suicidally arrogant,
socially graceless.
Anon.

Return To Scottish Quotations