Alexander McCall Smith Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don't know everything.

Alexander McCall Smith
We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.

Alexander McCall Smith
We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.

Alexander McCall Smith
Small things may be important to us; to be a sometime anything is sometimes something.

Alexander McCall Smith
Do not take on a traditionally built person unless you are prepared for a heavyweight bout.

Alexander McCall Smith
There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.

Alexander McCall Smith
But don't we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?

Alexander McCall Smith
International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.

Alexander McCall Smith
The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.

Alexander McCall Smith
The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.

Alexander McCall Smith
Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.

Alexander McCall Smith
When you allow people to do what they wish, then that is what they do. They stop doing the things they need to do.

Alexander McCall Smith
There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.

Alexander McCall Smith
The previously unloved may find it hard to believe that they are now loved; that is such a miracle, they feel; such a miracle.

Alexander McCall Smith
None of us knows how we will cope with snakes until the moment arises, and then most of us find out that we do not do it very well.

Alexander McCall Smith
How many of us are happy to be exactly where we are at any moment?...only the completely happy think that they are in the correct place.

Alexander McCall Smith
Our minds can come up with the most entertaining possibilities, if we let them. But most of the time, we keep them under far too close a check.

Alexander McCall Smith
I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.

Alexander McCall Smith
Do you realise that people die of boredom in London suburbs? It's the second biggest cause of death amongs the English in general. Sheer boredom...

Alexander McCall Smith
It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.

Alexander McCall Smith
I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything he says after twelve o'clock at night or after a glass or two of anything.

Alexander McCall Smith
And that, in a way, was the burden of being a philosopher: one knew what one had to do, but it was so often the opposite of what one really wanted to do.

Alexander McCall Smith
Each of us is born into our own mysteries…but the mystery of another might just take us in and embrace us. And then what a sense of homecoming, of belonging!

Alexander McCall Smith
We all know that it is women who take the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.

Alexander McCall Smith
A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

Alexander McCall Smith
That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.

Alexander McCall Smith
Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

Alexander McCall Smith
One might expect bad behaviour from existentialists – indeed that was what existentialism was all about, was it not? – but to find this happening on one's own doorstep was a shock.

Alexander McCall Smith
It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received.

Alexander McCall Smith
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 realize how widespread envy was.

Alexander McCall Smith