Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

53. “It is my duty to help them solve the mysteries in their lives. That is what I am called to do.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

54. “Simple questions – and simple answers – were what we needed in life. That was what Mma Ramotswe believed. Yes.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

55. “I said to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

56. “Forgiveness was never easy, but Mma Ramotswe believed in it because she knew that without forgiveness we cluttered our lives with old business.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

57. “Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

58. “That my philosophy of life is, as far as possible, one of enjoyment. I’m not nihilistic.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

59. “The realisation of our mortality came slowly, in dribs and drabs, until we bleakly acknowledged that everything was on loan to us for a short time – the world, our possessions, the people we knew and loved. But we could not spend our time dwelling on our mortality; we still had to behave as if the worst would not happen, for otherwise we would not do very much, we would be defeated and give up.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

60. “We can’t afford to be without God,” Feliks continued. “Even if he doesn’t exist, we have to hold on to him. Because if we don’t, then how are we to convince ourselves that we have to go on with this fight? If you take God out of it, then right and justice become small, human things. And weak things, too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

61. “Love was like rain; there could be periods of drought when it seemed that love would never return, would never make its presence felt again. In such times, the heart could harden, but then, just as droughts broke, so too could love suddenly appear, and heal just as quickly and completely as rain can heal the parched land.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

62. “A very powerful theme in fiction is that of loss.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

63. “The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That’s how most people thought.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

64. “I’ve always had a creative urge and I get immense satisfaction from creating something because it feels like I’m making sense of the world and imposing order on it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

65. “Every novel presents a slice of life. A noir policier for example presents one slice, one that perhaps addresses social dysfunction or some sort of pathology, while mine present a slice that is more upbeat and affirmative.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

66. “There were worlds within worlds, and each will have within its confines values and meaning. It may not really matter to the world at large, thought Isabel, that I should feel happy rather than sad, but it matters to me, and the fact that it matters matters.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

67. “Not all taxi drivers, Paul had discovered, actually wanted to take passengers to their destination; some of them, he felt, were in it for the arguments, or the opportunity to pontificate, or for the sheer pleasure of driving past those trying to summon them at the road edge. He made up his mind. What was the point of having a bulldozer if you were not going to make at least some use of it?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

68. “Yes, wisdom: that was something that came to everybody, although it came in varying quantities and at different times.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

69. “Sociopaths are attracted to politics because the see it as a sphere in which you can be ruthless and step all over people. That fact that some politicians can tell such awful lies is another example of sociopathy. Sociopaths lie – they see nothing wrong with it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

70. “This was a townscape raised in the teeth of cold winds from the east; a city of winding cobbled streets and haughty pillars; a city of dark nights and candlelight, and intellect.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

71. “There is room in history for all of us.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

72. “Yes, thought Mma Ramotswe, the world can be very discouraging. But we cannot sit and think about all the things that have gone wrong, or could go wrong. There was no point in doing that... There was much for which we could be grateful, whatever the sorrows of this world.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

73. “If more women were in power, they wouldn’t let wars break out,” she said. “Women can’t be bothered with all this fighting. We see war for what it is- a matter of broken bodies and crying mothers.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

74. “It was not edifying to dwell on the failings of others.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

75. “I was staying in a house beside the machair. In front of this house was a stretch of lawn, and at the edge of the lawn there was a river. By the riverside, its door wide open, was a shed into which I wandered. Inside the shed was a large art nouveau typesetting machine. I was being called, and I turned away from my discovery of the typesetting machine to make my way back to the house and to our hostess. People in dreams do not always have names, but she did. She was called Mrs. MacGregor.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

76. “There were plenty of people who did not really believe in God, but who wanted to believe in him, and said that they did. Some people said that these people were foolish, that they were hypocritical, but Mma Ramotswe was not so sure about that. If something, or somebody, could help you to get through life, to lead a life that was good and purposeful, did it matter all that much if that thing or that person did not exist? She thought it did not – not in the slightest bit. BY.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

77. “We find what we are looking for in life, her father had once said to her, which was true – if you look for happiness, you will see it; if you look for distrust and envy and hatred – all those things – you will find those too.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

78. “Perhaps this was a concomitant of freedom: if people were free, then some of them, at least, would be free of the constraints of good taste. Perhaps.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

79. “Small things may be important to us; to be a sometime anything is sometimes something.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

80. “Everybody has friends they dislike; people who they have slipped into relationships with, people they would not have chosen had they been more cautious, more circumspect.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

81. “Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

82. “A nudist? In Edinburgh? Does he realise what parallel we’re on?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

83. “We were tiny creatures, really; tiny and afraid, trying to hold our place on the little platform that was our earth. So while the world about us might seem so solid, so permanent, it was not really. We were all at the mercy of chance, no matter how confident we felt, hostages to our own human frailty.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

84. “Emma was happy. She realized that happiness is something that springs from the generous treatment of others, and that until one makes that connection, happiness may prove elusive.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

85. “Which is how most people acted when it came to temptation. They gave in. And we should never forget, thought Isabel, that every one of us is capable of doing the same thing if the game that we see for ourselves is large enough.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

86. “She meant it, and as she spoke, she thought how strange it was that we so very rarely said complimentary things to our friends, and how easy it was to do so, and how it made the world seem a less harsh place.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

87. “How many of us dig our own graves, thought William. We dig them with vigour and determination, unaware of the implications, but with all the conviction of those who do not really know what they are doing, who are impervious to the dangers that others can see so clearly.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

88. “You might imagine that the magic stopped at the airport, and to a great extent it did. When we arrived back in London, the skies were overcast and heavy. The bus driver from the airport was morose and unkempt; the streets seemed run-down and dirty, the people sour-faced. But that, I suspect, is how coming home is for everyone; Parisians probably felt the same when they returned from somewhere else.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

— Alexander McCall Smith

90. “Antonia was very conscious of the corrosive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realize how widespread envy was.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

91. “Chance; pure chance. But chance was a dull explanation because it denied the possibility of the paranormal, and people were often disappointed by dull explanations. Mystery and the unknown were far more exciting because they suggested that our world was not quite as prosaic as we feared it might be. Yet we had to adjure those temptations because they lead to a world of darkness and fear.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

92. “So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one’s own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their own solution?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

93. “There are some people who start off knowing very little about the world and end up years later knowing even less. Never underestimate the capacity of the human mind for ignorance.” Mr. Woodhouse found this very amusing.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

94. “Nobody is so bad that there is no chance of change.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

95. “There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

96. “The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

97. “And it was young men in red cars who were the most dangerous of all. Such people were best given a wide berth, both in and out of the car.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

98. “But don’t we often lie to people we love, or not tell them things, precisely because we love them?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

99. “Oh I love gadgets and I pride myself on keeping at the cutting edge of technology.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

100. “The problem, he thought, was that so much humour involved misfortune of one sort or another, and now that same human misfortune was out of bounds – interdicted by self-appointed guardians of sensitivity. There was somebody to be offended by everything, he though, which left little room for laughter.”

— Alexander McCall Smith