Alexander McCall Smith quotes

Alexander McCall Smith is a British-Zimbabwean writer and emeritus professor of medical law, renowned for his "No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency" series. His engaging storytelling and distinctive characters have found readers around the world. He continues to inspire with his wit, warmth, and prolific literary career. Here are 93 of his quotes:

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

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

Alexander McCall Smith

Old friends, like old shoes, are comfortable. But old shoes, unlike old friends, tend not to be supportive: it is easier to stumble and sprain an ankle while wearing a pair of old shoes than it is in new shoes, with their less yielding leather.

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

It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.

Alexander McCall Smith

But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? – and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.

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

It's very important to be able to accept things, you know. Gracious acceptance is an art – an art which most of never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.

Alexander McCall Smith

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

Alexander McCall Smith

There is room in history for all of us.

Alexander McCall Smith

If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.

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

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

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

When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope.

Alexander McCall Smith

Special things have a way of surviving.

Alexander McCall Smith

And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice – based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom – how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

Alexander McCall Smith

The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that's how it should be.

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

Every small wrong, every minor act of cruelty, every act of petty bullying was symbolic of a greater wrong. And if we ignored these small things, then did it not blunt our outrage over the larger wrongs?

Alexander McCall Smith

These tests are designed to exclude others from the discourse - just as the word discourse is itself designed to do. These words are intended to say to people: this is a group thing. If you don't understand what we're talking about, you're not a member of the group. So, if you call this place the Canny Man's it shows that you belong, that you know what's what in Edinburgh. And that, you know, is what everybody wants, underneath. We want to belong.

Alexander McCall Smith

Things can end badly, as they sometimes do in life. But if they do, then we know that something is wrong, just as we know it when a piece of music doesn't resolve itself properly at the end. We know that. We just do. And so we prefer harmony.

Alexander McCall Smith