Text and authors of the quotations inscribed on the Canongate Wall

Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, and my redeemer.

Psalm 19:14

There is hope in honest error;
None in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928)

Bright is the ring of words.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) "Songs of Travel"

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

Alasdair Gray (1934-)

© Canongate Press (paraphrased from Dennis Lee’s Civil Elegies. Toronto: Anansi,1972)

When we had a king, and a chancellor, and parliament-men o' our ain, we could aye peeble them wi' stanes when they werena gude bairns - But naebody's nails can reach the length o' Lunnon.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) Mrs Howden in "Heart of Midlothian"

Sweet ghosts in a loving band
Roam through the houses that stand -
For the builders are not gone.

George Macdonald (1824-1905) "Song"

Put all your eggs into one basket -and then watch that basket.

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919)

What a lovely, lovely moon.
And it's in the constituency too.

Alan Jackson (1938-) "The Young Politician Looks at the Moon"

© the author

From the lone sheiling of the misty island
Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas -
Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland,
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.

Anonymous "Canadian Boat Song" First appeared 1829

Is i Alba nan Gall's nan Gaidheal is gàire is blàth is beatha dhomh.
It is Scotland, Highland and Lowland that is laughter and warmth and life for me.

George Campbell Hay (1915-1984) "The Four Winds of Scotland"

© W L Lorimer Memorial Trust

The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet - and breaks the heart.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) "The Little White Rose"

© Carcanet Press

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!
It wad frae monie a blunder free us
An' foolish notion.

Robert Burns (1759-1796) "To a Louse"

But Edinburgh is a mad god's dream
Fitful and dark,
Unseizable in Leith
And wildered by the Forth,
But irresistibly at last
Cleaving to sombre heights
Of passionate imagining
Till stonily,
From soaring battlements,
Earth eyes Eternity.

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978)

© Carcanet Press

Abair ach beagan is abair gu math e.

Seannfhacal

Say but little and say it well.

Proverb

So, cam' all ye at hame wi' freedom
Never heed whit the hoodies croak for doom
In your hoose a' the bairns o' Adam
Can find breid, barley bree an' painted room.

Hamish Henderson (1919-2002) "The Freedom come all ye"  

© Mrs K Henderson

This is my country,
The land that begat me.
These windy spaces
Are surely my own.
And those who toil here
In the sweat of their faces
Are flesh of my flesh,
And bone of my bone.

Sir Alexander Gray (1882-1968) "Scotland"

© John Gray

This poem was the result of a day out fishing in a burn across the field from the Lairhillock Inn some seven miles from Aberdeen, and the landscape described in the earlier stanzas ‘scooped out like a saucer’ is recognisable to this day.

tell us about last night

well, we had a wee ferintosh and we lay on the quiraing. it was pure strontian!

Edwin Morgan (1920- )

© Carcanet Press

The battle for conservation will go on endlessly. It is part of the universal battle between right and wrong.

John Muir (1838-1914)

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man the world o'er,
Shall brithers be for a' that.

Robert Burns (1759-1796) "A Man's A Man for A' That"

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) "Inversnaid"

Seannfhacal

He who sowest best reapest best.

Proverb

To promise is ae thing, to keep it is anither.

Proverb

(I knew a very wise man who believed that) if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.

Andrew Fletcher (1655-1716)

Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?

Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) "Scotland Small?"

© Carcanet Press