Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

2. “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

3. “Like ageism and sexism, lookism was everywhere, resulting in the good-looking getting the best jobs, winning all the plaudits, being let off the most parking tickets by soft-hearted traffic wardens; being generally favoured.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

4. “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

5. “Talking about pumpkins doesn’t make them grow.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

6. “One of the most destructive things that’s happening in modern society is that we are losing our sense of the bonds that bind people together – which can lead to nightmares of social collapse.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

7. “Everybody in a village had a role to play in bringing up a child – and cherishing it – and in return that child would in due course feel responsible for everybody in that village. That is what makes life in society possible. We must love one another and help one another in our daily lives. That was the traditional African way and there was no substitute for it. None.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

8. “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

9. “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

10. “At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

11. “There is plenty of work for love to do.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

12. “Late people do not altogether leave us, she thought; they are still with us in memories such as that, wherever we are, no matter what time of day it was or how we were feeling, they were there, still shining the light of their love upon us.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

13. “It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don’t know everything.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

14. “She had so much love to give – she had always felt that – and now there was somebody to whom she could give this love, and that, she knew, was good; for that is what redeems us, that is what makes our pain and sorrow bearable – this giving of love to others, this sharing of the heart.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

15. “Do not complain about your life. Do not blame others for things that you have brought upon yourself. 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

16. “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

17. “Mma Ramotswe reflected on how easy it was to find oneself committed to a course of action simply because one lacked the courage to say no.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

18. “Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

19. “I am capable of being idle.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

20. “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

21. “That young man will go far, she said. I don’t know in what direction, but he will go far.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

22. “There is no need to be unkind to people who are unhappy inside themselves. There is room for everyone. Everyone should be able to find somewhere on this earth to sit down.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

23. “International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

24. “There is a difference between a challenge and a burden. One is something you can carry on your shoulders easily enough – the other is something, a big sack, that bends you double.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

25. “The Okavango Delta is an astonishing sight: the great Okavango River, rather than flow towards the sea, flows inland, into the sands of the Kalahari.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

26. “A traditional house smelled of wood smoke, the earth, and of thatch; all good smells, the smell of life itself.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

27. “Ritual is a terribly important, binding cement in a society. If we abandon formality and rituals, we’re actually weakening the relationships that exist between people that bind.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

28. “There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

29. “She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

30. “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

31. “Botswana is actually very peaceful. It’s democratic. It never was in debt. They’ve been fortunate, they’ve had diamonds.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

32. “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

33. “My parents were very supportive and always encouraged us. My father was a gentle, nice man. My mother was quite a colorful character and a keen reader who encouraged me to write.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

34. “My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; weve become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

35. “There was the Queen, and then there was Seretse Khama and our own people. That is called history, you see.” “But who asked them here?” The aunt shook her head. “There are some guests who do not knock.” “That is very rude.” “Yes,” said the aunt.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

36. “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 once I saw the hills of Fife across the Forth, things of that sort, our personal memories, that make the private tapestry of our lives.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

37. “Do you know that dogs are descendants of wolves – all dogs, even those ridiculous little dogs you see in the parks. Wolves. Imagine how embarrassed a real wolf would be if he knew that he was cousin to a shih-tzu? Of course, we shouldn’t think animals have feelings like us – I don’t think they can be embarrassed, do you? My daughter’s cat is incapable of feeling anything very much, I can tell you – and certainly not embarrassment...”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

39. “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

40. “Tea, thought Mma Ramotswe – no matter what was happening, no matter how difficult things became, there was always the tea break – that still moment, that unchangeable ritual, that survived everything, made normal the abnormal, renewed one’s ability to cope with whatever the world laid before one. Tea.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

41. “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

42. “Stand on your toe. That is what one said in Setswana if one hoped that something would happen. It was the same as the expression which white people used: cross your fingers.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

44. “It’s through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

45. “What do the Texans say? All hat, no cattle.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

46. “Do I shock you? I think I do. That’s the problem these days – nobody speaks their mind. No, don’t smile. They really don’t. We’ve been browbeaten into conformity by all sorts of people who tell us what we can and cannot say. Haven’t you noticed it? The tyranny of political correctness. Don’t pass any judgement on anything. Don’t open your trap in case you offend somebody or other.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

47. “We should be careful of the insults we fling at others, lest they return and land at our feet, newly minted to apply to those who had first coined them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

48. “Do not be ashamed to cry, Rra,” said Mma Ramotswe. “It is the way that things begin to get better. It is the first step.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

49. “Do not act meanly, do not be unkind, because the time for setting things right may pass before your heart changes course. Isabel Dalhousie.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

50. “Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds.”

— Alexander McCall Smith