Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) was a Scottish poet and novelist. He is an acknowledged master of the historical novel and was influential in his treatment of rural themes and the use of regional speech.
Born in Edinburgh into an affluent middle-class family, Scott experienced an attack of infantile paralysis that left him permanently lame from the age of two. He was sent to his grandfather’s farm to restore his health; there, he was exposed to Scottish history through ballads and stories—these shaped his storytelling talent. Scott trained in law at the University of Edinburgh, but his main interest lay in literature, which he pursued first as an editor and a translator.
Scott established himself as a major poet and a scholarly editor. Scott first made his mark as a poet—he collected, edited, and adapted ballads. He wrote the popular such famous narrative poems as The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808.)
Scott is best known as the author of the Waverley novels (named after the first of the series, Waverley, 1814.) His novels, which usually feature accounts of chivalry and romance, changed the landscape of the novel, making the historical novel not just a national but also a planetary form. Waverley was an immediate success, and it was followed by a series of Scottish novels, including Rob Roy (1818) and The Heart of Midlothian (1818.) Among his later novels are Ivanhoe (1819,) Kenilworth (1821,) and Quentin Durward (1823.)
During his lifetime and for almost a century after his death, Scott was a massively popular writer. Scott’s influence influenced not only English but also world literature in the 19th century: he left his mark on writers as varied as Mark Twain, Alexander Pushkin, Stendhal, James Fenimore Cooper, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Dickens.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Walter Scott
Love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Tears
It is a great dishonor to religion to imagine that it is an enemy to mirth and cheerfulness, and a severe exacter of pensive looks and solemn faces.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Religion
As good play for nothing, you know, as work for nothing.
—Walter Scott
Just at the age ‘twixt boy and youth, When thought is speech, and speech is truth
—Walter Scott
Topics: Youth
This world is a dream within a dream; and as we grow older, each step is an awakening. The youth awakes, as he thinks, from childhood; the full-grown man despises the pursuits of youth as visionary; and the old man looks on manhood as a feverish dream. Death the last sleep? No! It is the last and final awakening!
—Walter Scott
Topics: Death, Dying, World
If you once turn on your side after the hour at which you ought to rise, it is all over. Bolt up at once.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Discipline
When thinking about companions gone, we feel ourselves doubly alone.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Loneliness
Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
To all the sensual world proclaim,
One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Life and Living, Age
Although too much of a soldier among sovereigns, no one could claim with better right to be a sovereign among soldiers.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Soldiers
Youth, when thought is speech and speech is truth.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Youth
There are those to whom a sense of religion has come in storm and tempest; there are those whom it has summoned amid scenes of revelry and idle vanity; there are those, too, who have heard its “still small voice” amid rural leisure and placid retirement. But perhaps the knowledge which causeth not to err is most frequently impressed upon the mind during the season of affliction.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Religion
I cannot tell how the truth may be;
I say the tale as ’twas said to me.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Storytelling
The pith of conversation does not consist in exhibiting your own superior knowledge on matters of small importance, but in enlarging, improving, and correcting the information you possess, by the authority of others.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Conversation
Is death the last step? No, it is the final awakening.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Death, Dying
I like a highland friend who will stand by me not only when I am in the right, but when I am a little in the wrong.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Friendship
He who indulges his sense in any excesses, renders himself obnoxious to his own reason; and to gratify the brute in him, displeases the man, and sets his two natures at variance.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Excess
True love’s the gift which God hath given to man alone beneath the heaven. The silver link, the silver tie, which heart to heart, and mind to mind, in body and in soul can bind.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Love
Adversity is, to me at least, a tonic and a bracer.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity
Heap on the wood!-the wind is chill; But let it whistle as it will, We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Christmas
The race of mankind would perish, did they cease to aid each other. From the time that the mother binds the child’s head till the moment that some kind assistant wipes the death-damp from the brow of the dying, we cannot exist without mutual help. All, therefore, that need aid have a right to ask it from their fellow-mortals; no one who holds the power of granting can refuse it without guilt.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Help, Kindness, Service, Assistance, Giving, Aid, Humanity
From my experience, not one in twenty marries the first love; we build statues of snow, and weep to see them melt.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Snow, Ideals, Responsibility, Marriage
When we think of death, a thousand sins, which we have trodden as worms beneath our feet, rise up against us as flaming serpents.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Sin
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Poets, Poetry
The most learned, acute, and diligent student cannot, in the longest life, obtain an entire knowledge of this one volume. The more deeply he works the mine, the richer and more abundant he finds the ore, new light continually beams from this source of heavenly knowledge, to direct the conduct, and illustrate the work of God and the ways of men; and he will at last leave the world confessing, that the more he studied the Scriptures, the fuller conviction he had of his own ignorance, and of their inestimable value.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Bible
A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Law, Lawyers
It is only when I daily with what I am about, look back and aside instead of keeping my eyes straight forward, that I feel these cold sinkings of the heart. But the first broadside puts all to rights.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Secrets of Success, Concentration, Focus
Then, wearied by the uncertainty and difficulties with which each scheme appeared to be attended, he bent up his mind to the strong effort of shaking off his love, like dew-drops from the lion’s mane, and resuming those studies and that career of life which his unrequited affection had so long and so fruitlessly interrupted. In this last resolution he endeavoured to fortify himself by every argument which pride, as well as reason, could suggest.
—Walter Scott
The sincere and earnest approach of the Christian to the throne of the Almighty, teaches the best lesson of patience under affliction, since wherefore should we mock the Deity with supplications, when we insult him by murmuring under his decrees?
—Walter Scott
Topics: Patience
If you have no friends to share or rejoice in your success in life—if you cannot look back to those to whom you owe gratitude, or forward to those to whom you ought to afford protection, still it is no less incumbent on you to move steadily in the path of duty; for your active exertions are due not only to society; but in humble gratitude to the Being who made you a member of it, with powers to serve yourself and others.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Friendship, Action, Friends and Friendship
Court not the critic’s smile nor dread his frown.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Criticism
Though wit be very useful, yet unless a wise man has the keeping of it, that knows when, where, and how to apply it, it is like wild fire, that runs hissing about, and blows up everything that comes in its way.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Wit
What can we see in the longest kingly line in Europe, save that it runs back to a successful soldier?
—Walter Scott
Topics: Ancestry
Guilt, though it may attain temporal splendor, can never confer real happiness; the evil consequences of our crimes long survive their commission, and, like the ghosts of the murdered, forever haunt the steps of the malefactor; while the paths of virtue, though seldom those of worldly greatness, are always those of pleasantness and peace.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Guilt, Virtue, Sin
Each age has deemed the new-born year the fittest time for festal cheer.
—Walter Scott
Tears are the softening showers which cause the seed of heaven to spring up in the human heart.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Tears
To the timid and hesitating everything is impossible because it seems so.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Positive Attitudes, Optimism, Secrets of Success, Safety, Courage, Prudence, Determination
The faces which have charmed us the most escape us the soonest.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Charm, Faces, Face
When passion rules, how rare the hours that fall to virtue’s share.
—Walter Scott
Topics: Passion
Better that they had ne’er been born who read to doubt, or read to scorn.
—Walter Scott
Haste, holy Friar,
Haste, ere the sinner shall expire!
Of all his guilt let him be shriven,
And smooth his path from earth to heaven!
—Walter Scott
Topics: Guilt
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