Tonight I drink to "honest men and sonsie lassies", and reflect on my patrilineage.
Here are some verdicts on the Scottish character which I've picked up over the years -

Scotus est, piper in naso.
(He is a Scot, pepper in the nose). A medieval warning from continental Europe, where the Scots had a reputation for violent reaction to a word out of turn. In the Middle Ages the term 'Scot' might have identified an Irish person too, but would those continentals have recognised a difference? The Irish didn't appear to: "The Kings of Scotia Minor all trace their blood to our Scotia Major and retain to some degree our language and customs." Thus the Irish king Domhnall Ó Néill to Pope John XXII.
My Old Lady firmly believed that the Scots were really Irish who took a wrong turn at the Reformation.

Fier comme un Ecossais.
(Proud as a Scot) a French simile. I don't know what the Scots had done to the French. Did those Gardes écossais pull rank on their hosts? Was it know-alls like the 'Admirable Crichton' and Thomas Dempster getting up their noses?

... qu'on n'irritast les Ecossois, sachant bien que les Ecossois estaient pauvres mais gens vaillants.
(Loose translation, "Don't upset the Jocks, they're hard as well as hard-up"). A warning from the German Emperor Charles V (1500-58).

Les Ecossais sont bons philosophes.
Joseph Scaliger (1540-1609). Scaliger was a French Protestant, so he may have regarded Scottish thinkers as allies against popery.

Every Scottishman has a pedigree. It is a national prerogative as unalienable as his pride and his poverty.
Sir Walter Scott, a minor novelist.

It is never difficult to tell the difference between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.
Stereotyping courtesy of P.G.Wodehouse, "English Literature's performing flea".

Sandy is our national figure - a shy, subtle, disgruntled idiosyncratic individual - very different from John Bull.
Stereotyping courtesy of Hugh MacDiarmid, a disgruntled, idiosyncratic individual.

The Scots, like the Spaniards and the Rajputs, are a race of noblemen.
Sir Thomas Innes of Learney, who held the office of Lord Lyon King of Arms from 1945 to 1969. He was an old reactionary, but he wouldn't let the English heralds ignore Scotland's sovereignty, or her ancient customs.
The basis of his claim (I think) is that all Scottish chiefs and heidsmen are noble, in the continental sense; and all clansmen, being cadets therefore of noble houses, can lay claim to familial noblesse. A bit of a stretch, but a nose-thumbing at the English fiction that there is no possibility of a shared ancestry between the gentry and the commonalty.

Wha's like us, eh?
Rab C. Nesbitt, trying to explain away some drunken escapade as Scottish eccentricity.