Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people - at the most.

— Alexander McCall Smith

And if there's bad behavior," MMA Cookware went on. "If there's bad behavior, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love. That always works, you know. People say we must punish when there is wrongdoing, but if you punish you're only punishing yourself. And what's the point of that?

— Alexander McCall Smith

And if you do see any pirates, I don't want you to pick up any rough manners from them. Do you understand?

— Alexander McCall Smith

And then the second thing you have to do is go and see your son. That is a duty of love, Andrew. It's as simple as that. A duty of love. Do you understand what I'm saying to you?

— Alexander McCall Smith

...and with it would come that wonderful, unmistakable smell of rain, that smell of dust and water meeting that lingered for a few seconds in the nostrils and then was gone, and would be missed, sometimes for months, before the next time that it caught you and made you stop and say to the person with you, any person: That is the smell of rain, there, right now.

— Alexander McCall Smith

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

Anybody can lose,' cautioned Mr J.L.B. Macedonia. 'You need to remember that every time you win.

— Alexander McCall Smith

A photograph may speak to the photographer's envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing is impossible--if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart--most of us do, in one way or another.

— Alexander McCall Smith