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Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)

Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “Manners are the basic building blocks of civil society.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Talking about pumpkins doesn’t make them grow.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “At night we are all strangers, even to ourselves.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “There is plenty of work for love to do.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “It is sometimes easier to be happy if you don’t know everything.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “I am capable of being idle.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “That young man will go far, she said. I don’t know in what direction, but he will go far.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “A traditional house smelled of wood smoke, the earth, and of thatch; all good smells, the smell of life itself.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “There are old mycologists and there are bold mycologists, but there are no old, bold mycologists.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “She was made for untidy rooms and rumpled beds.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “Botswana is actually very peaceful. It’s democratic. It never was in debt. They’ve been fortunate, they’ve had diamonds.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “We think the world is ours forever, but we are little more than squatters.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “If your ceiling should fall down, then you have lost a room, but gained a courtyard. Think of it that way.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “It’s through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “What do the Texans say? All hat, no cattle.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “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 Quote: “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 Quote: “Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “To dispatch one’s friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one’s own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it.”
Alexander McCall Smith Quote: “Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.”
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