Top 350 Alexander McCall Smith Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I like you when you’re algebraic,” said Ulf – and immediately regretted it. It was a flirtatious remark – describing somebody as algebraic was undoubtedly to cross a line. You would not normally describe an ordinary friend as algebraic, and then say that you liked her that way.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

102. “Inside every one of us, thought Mma Ramotswe, there is the child we once were, the child that was unsure about the world and our place in it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

103. “People who do that sort of thing may reap what they sow, but they also destroy the harvest of those who are around them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

104. “Edinburgh used to be a haughty city.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

105. “Is it hard to raise an elephant?” It was some minutes before anybody answered. But then Debra said, “I don’t think so, Mma. It’s not hard to do anything if you do it with love.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

106. “Life consists of positive and negative features, and I think that it is permissible to write about both.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

107. “It was easy to be moral when that was the way you felt anyway. The hard bit about morality was making yourself feel the opposite of what you really felt.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

108. “There are many temptations in this life, but cake is probably one of the biggest of them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

109. “For that, surely, is what friendship is all about–about the giving of love and the assurance of love.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

110. “Look at every territorial dispute you care to mention. Northern Ireland, for instance.” “Religion in that case,” Jamie ventured. “Not just. Religion was the badge of identity, but it wasn’t really about whether you went to Mass or to a tub-thumping Protestant chapel. It was a result of the movement of people. The Protestant planters – many of them Scots – replaced the native Irish, remember? Movement of people again.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

111. “Everything has been something before.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

112. “Now the tea began to do its work- as it always did- and the world that only a few minutes previously had seemed so bleak started to seem less so.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

113. “We are all tempted, Mma. We are all tempted when it comes to cake.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

114. “She shook her head. What was the point of anger? There were occasions when Mma Ramotswe, like all of us, could feel angry, but they were few – and they never lasted long. Anger, Obed Ramotswe had explained to her once, is no more than a salt that we rub into our wounds. She had never forgotten that – along with the things he said about cattle, and Botswana, and the behaviour of the rains.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

115. “It was a pink sort of smell- a smell that seemed to get bigger as you smelled it and then burst, just like the popping of a bubble.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

116. “You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

117. “There are some very inventive adults, Mma. When you listen to them, you have to divide everything they say by two, and then take away ten. As you have to do with some politicians.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

118. “We are human and vulnerable, whatever our individual situation: The moon looks on them all The Healers and the brilliant talkers The eccentrics and the silent walkers The dumpy and the tall.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

119. “To be cut down to size is good for all of us, but particularly so for those who forget how transient are our cultures and institutions, how pointless and cruel our divisions, how vain our claims to special status for our practices and beliefs above those of others.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

120. “The sharing of a book is a statement – a message of affection that is also an act of self-revelation. Join my club, it says. Come and sit beside me.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

121. “The sun went, and it was dark. He sat beside her in the comfortable darkness and they listened, contentedly, to the sounds of Africa settling down for the night. A dog barked somewhere; a car engine raced and then died away; there was a touch of wind, warm dusty wind, redolent of thorn trees.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

122. “Brother Fox looked in. He saw two people. He saw them raise their glasses of wine to him, liquid that for him was suspended in the air, as if by a miracle.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

123. “People were forever digging up events that had taken place a long time ago. And what was the point in doing this if the effect was merely to poison the present? There were many wrongs in the past, but did it help to keep bringing them up and giving them a fresh airing?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

124. “The point about love, the essential point, was that we loved what we loved. We did not choose. We just loved.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

125. “When there is nothing you can do to stop the march of adverse events, then the best thing, she felt, was to get on with life and not to worry.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

126. “It’s really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry,” said Angus Lordie. “In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

127. “He would sit down and consider the situation carefully. Not only did this help to identify the solution to the problem, but it also gave him the opportunity to remind himself that things were not really as bad as they seemed; it was all a question of perspective. Sitting down and looking up at the sky for a few minutes – not at any particular part of the sky, but just at the sky in general – at the vast, dizzying, empty sky of Botswana, cut human problems down to size.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

128. “Well,” said Mma Ramotswe, “I have felt that anger. I felt it when I saw that the van had gone. I felt it a bit in the truck on the way back. But what is the point of anger now, Mma? I don’t think that anger will help us.” Mma Makutsi sighed. “You are right about anger,” she said. “There is no point in it.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

129. “Most people want nothing to happen. That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

130. “We forget, she thought. We think that we were always the way we are now, but we were not. –.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

131. “I am grateful to you for being who you are: for standing up for ladies with large glasses and a bad skin and for everybody else who has had to battle to get where they have got. And most of all I am grateful to you for being my friend, Mma; I am grateful to you for that. That is the best thing that anybody can be to anybody else – a friend.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

132. “There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

133. “We like to think that we plan what happens to us, but it is chance, surely, that lies behind so many of the great events of our lives – the meeting with the person with whom we are destined to spend the rest of our days, the receiving of a piece of advice whic influences our choice of career, the spotting of a particular house for sale; all of these may be put down to pur chance, and yet they govern how our lives work out and how happy – or unhappy – we were going to be.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

134. “When somebody does wrong, Emma, we must remember that that person is still a human being like the rest of us. We must not rush to throw the first stone. We must remind ourselves that all of us do wrong from time to time, unless we’re saints, which we aren’t.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

135. “You can’t do much about a personality disorder. Cats are psychopaths at heart.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

136. “We think that we can fix our lives by taking some simple step, but it’s not like that. Most problems need lots of sticking plasters. They need coaxing and massaging and looking at from all sorts of different angles.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

137. “It’s a different sort of love taht puts up with illness. Old love.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

138. “It was easy to make a difference to other people’s lives, so easy to change the little room in which people lived their life.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

139. “We do not talk about wise men or wise ladies any more, she reflected; their place had been taken, it seemed, by all sorts of shallow people – actors and the like – who were only too ready to pronounce on all sorts of subjects.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

140. “Self-pity does not appreciate pedantry.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

141. “It is not enough just to identify a problem; there are plenty of people who were very skilled at pointing out what was wrong with the world, but they were not always so adept at working out how these things could be righted.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

142. “Not forgiving was like scratching at a sore to keep the healing scab from forming.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

143. “Places had echoes- and if one were sensitive, one might just pick up some resonance from the past, some feeling for what had happened.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

144. “And the problem was that there was a positive epidemic of narcissism, encouraged by commercial manipulation and by the shallow values of Hollywood films. And interestingly enough, the real growth area was male narcissism.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

145. “She would give him the benefit of the doubt, as she always did: her experience had taught her that the names we gave to others, and the things we accused them of, often said more about us than they did about them.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

146. “Make sure that the road is always clear for your enemy to leave’?”

— Alexander McCall Smith

147. “Our possessing of our world is a temporary matter: we stamp our ownership upon our surroundings, give familiar names to the land about us, erect statues of ourselves, but all of this is swept away, so quickly, so easily. We think the world is ours for ever, but we are little more than squatters.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

148. “The telling of a story, like virtually everything in this life, was always made all the easier by a cup of tea.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

149. “It seems to me that we’re in danger of losing sight of certain basic civic values in society by allowing the growth of a whole generation of people who really have no sense of attachment to society.”

— Alexander McCall Smith

150. “Truth had a way of coming out on top – and it was just as well for everybody that it did. If there ever came a day when truth was so soundly defeated that it never emerged, but sank, instead, under the sheer volume of untruth that the world produced, then that would be a sad day for Botswana, and for the people who lived in Botswana. It would be a sad day for the whole world, that day.”

— Alexander McCall Smith