I want someone to laugh with me, someone to be grave with me, someone to please me and help my discrimination with his or her own remark, and at times, no doubt, to admire my acuteness and penetration.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Laughter
Let us do or die.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Action
They never sought in vain, that sought the Lord aright.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Prayer
Suspicion is a heavy armor and with its weight it impedes more than it protects.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Doubt
How wretched is the person who hangs on by the favors of the powerful.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Kindness
Their sighing , canting , grace-proud faces, their three-mile prayers, and half-mile graces.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Grace
Man’s inhumanity to man, makes countless thousands mourn.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Cruelty
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp; the man’s the gold for all that.
—Robert Burns
I pick my favorite quotation and store them in my mind as ready armor, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Quotations
When matters are desperate we must put on a desperate face.
—Robert Burns
Go fetch to me a pint o wine, an fill it in a silver tassie.
—Robert Burns
Dearly bought the hidden treasure, finer feelings can bestow; chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure, thrill the deepest notes of woe.
—Robert Burns
Midnight — that hour of night’s black arch the keystone.
—Robert Burns
I could never pour out my inmost soul without reserve to any human being, without danger of one day repenting my confidence.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Confidence
And the spring comes slowly up this way.
—Robert Burns
Though losses and crosses be lessons right severe, there’s wit there ye’ll get there, ye’ll find no other where.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Adversity
Some say kissing is a sin; but if it was na lawful, lawyers would na allow it; if it was na holy, ministers would na do it; if it was na modest, maidens would na take it; if it was na plenty, puir folk would na get it.
—Robert Burns
Dare to be honest and fear no labor.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Honesty
A mind conscious of integrity scorns to say more than it means to perform.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Promise
Hope springs exulting on triumphant wing.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Hope
Firmness, both in suffering and exertion, is a character which I would wish to possess. — I have always despised the whining yelp of complaint, and the cowardly feeble resolve.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Determination
Had we never lov’d sae kindly, Had we never lov’d sae blindly, Never met — or never parted — we had never been broken-hearted.
—Robert Burns
The daisy’s for simplicity and unaffected air.
—Robert Burns
There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Uncertainty, Certainty
The heart benevolent and kind the most resembles God.
—Robert Burns
Topics: Kindness
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
gang aft a-gley.
—Robert Burns
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Walter Scott Scottish Novelist
Robert Louis Stevenson Scottish Novelist
Tobias Smollett Scottish Poet
Robert W. Service Scottish Poet
George MacDonald Scottish Poet, Novelist
Hugh Blair Scottish Minister, Scholar
Adam Smith Scottish Philosopher
David Livingstone Scottish Missionary, Explorer
J. M. Barrie Scottish Novelist
Thomas Carlyle Scottish Historian, Essayist