I can read more languages than I speak! I speak French and Italian - not very well, alas, but I can get by. I read German and Spanish. I can read Latin (I did a lot of Latin at school.) I'm afraid I do not speak any African languages, although I can understand a little bit of the Zulu-related languages, but only a tiny bit.

Alexander McCall Smith

Categorized in : School Latin Italian

You can go through life and make new friends every year - every month practically - but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

Alexander McCall Smith

friendship life years

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

cups stories tea

Most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

Alexander McCall Smith

gratitude government thinking

The Culture of Complaint... We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It's all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.

Alexander McCall Smith

complaining desire culture

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

moments thinking

Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.

Alexander McCall Smith

building block manners

Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most 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.... Accepting another person's gift is allowing him to express his feelings for you.

Alexander McCall Smith

acceptance art thinking

Regular maps have few surprises: their contour lines reveal where the Andes are, and are reasonably clear. More precious, though, are the unpublished maps we make ourselves, of our city, our place, our daily world, our life; those maps of our private world we use every day; here I was happy, in that place I left my coat behind after a party, that is where I met my love; I cried there once, I was heartsore; but felt better round the corner..., things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.

Alexander McCall Smith

party cities memories

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

finding-yourself understanding joy

There is room in history for all of us.

Alexander McCall Smith

rooms

I see no point in being despondent. We might as well enjoy ourselves during our brief tenure of this life.

Alexander McCall Smith

this-life enjoy might

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

snakes arise moments

We don't forget.... Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which came back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we are.

Alexander McCall Smith

smell sky memories

There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.

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

parent mother discovery

They're very beautiful, aren't they? Clouds are very beautiful and yet so often we fail to appreciate them properly. We should do that. We should look at them and think about how lucky we are to have them.

Alexander McCall Smith

clouds beautiful thinking

It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for going on. Pumpkin.

Alexander McCall Smith

finals analysis thinking

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

Alexander McCall Smith

irony ironic happiness

It seems to me that we're in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.

Alexander McCall Smith

attachment sight people

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

new-shoes supportive old-friends