John Buchan Quotes

The book trade is a spiritual barometer of a nations well-being.

We must all be fighters and strugglers, Lewie, and it is better to wear out than to rust out. It is bad to let choice things become easily familiar; for, you know, familiarity is apt to beget a proverbial offspring. The

It was strange how fear had gone,now that we knew the worst and had a fighting man by our side.

By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.

The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.

It was foreordained that I should go alone to Umvelos', and in the promptings of my own infallible heart I believed I saw the workings of Omnipotence. Such is our moral arrogance, and yet without such a belief I think that mankind would have ever been content to bide sluggishly at home.

But some love not the method of your first; Romance they count it, throw't away as dust; If I should meet with such, what should I say; Must I slight them as they slight me, or nay

He who would valiant be against all disaster; let him in constancy follow the Master. There's no discouragement shall make him once relent; his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.

It was a soft breathless June morning, with a promise of sultriness later ...

When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.

This is all a tale of an older world and a forgotten countryside. At this moment of time change has come; a screaming line of steel runs through the heather of no-man's-land, and the holiday-maker claims the valleys for his own. But this busyness is but of yesterday, and not ten years ago the fields lay quiet to the gaze of placid beasts and the wandering stars. This story I have culled from the grave of an old fashion, and set down for the love of a great soul and the poetry of life.

In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.

My thoughts hovered over all varieties of mortal edible, and finally settled on a porterhouse steak and a quart of bitter with a welsh rabbit to follow. In longing hopelessly for these dainties I fell asleep.

I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.

The secret belongs only to the Maker of good and faithful dogs.

Pessimism is the one ism which kills the soul.

He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.

I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.

This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. ... Faulty though my own practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine - the virtue of a clean, bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern. Above all the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed, and also confirmed. For if the classics widened my sense of the joy of life they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted the dignity of human nature they insisted upon its frailties and the aidos with which the temporal must regard the eternal. I lost then any chance of being a rebel, for I became profoundly conscious of the dominion of unalterable law. ... Indeed, I cannot imagine a more precious viaticum than the classics of Greece and Rome, or a happier fate than that one's youth should be intertwined with their world of clear, mellow lights, gracious images, and fruitful thoughts. They are especially valuable to those who believe that Time enshrines and does not destroy, and who do what I am attempting to do in these pages, and go back upon and interpret the past. No science or philosophy can give that colouring, for such provide a schematic, and not a living, breathing universe. And I do not think that the mastery of other literatures can give it in a like degree, for they do not furnish the same totality of life - a complete world

Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.

But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go even when you're feeling empty inside, and your blood's thin, and there's no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble's not over in an hour or two but lasts for months and years.

Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future.

The world was arrogant and self-satisfied, but behind all this confidence there was an uneasy sense of impending disaster. The old creeds, both religious and political , were largely in the process of dissolution, but we did not realise the fact , and therefore did not look for new foundations.

He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster.

We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.

The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.

Bethink you of the blessedness. Every wife is like the Mother of God and has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind.

Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.

I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.

Pardon,' he said, 'I'm a bit rattled tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead.

And where the deepest current crawls/ Like thistledown the dainty fly falls./ Then from the depths a silver gleam/ Quick flashes, like a jewel bright./ Up through the waters of the stream/ An instant visible to sight/ As lightning cleaves to sombre sky/ A rainbow rises to the fly.

There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness.

About six in the evening I came out of the moorland to a white ribbon of road which wound up the narrow vale of a lowland stream. As I followed it, fields gave place to bent, the glen became a plateau, and presently I had reached a kind of pass where a solitary house smoked in the twilight. The road swung over a bridge, and leaning on the parapet was a young man. He was smoking a long clay pipe and studying the water with spectacled eyes. In his left hand was a small book with a finger marking the place. Slowly he repeated - As when a Gryphon through the wilderness With winged step, o'er hill and moory dale Pursues the Arimaspian. He jumped round as my step rung on the keystone, and I saw a pleasant sunburnt boyish face. 'Good evening to you,' he said gravely. 'It's a fine night for the road.' The smell of peat smoke and of some savoury roast floated to me from the house.

The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

The men who knew that he knew what he knew had found him

It would scarcely be destruction," he replied gently. "Let us call it iconoclasm, the swallowing of formulas, which has always had its full retinue of idealists. And you do not want a Napoleon . All that is needed is direction, which could be given by men of far lower gifts than a Bonaparte. In a word, you want a Power-House, and then the age of miracles will begin.

All this was very loose guessing, and I don't pretend it was ingenious or scientific. I wasn't any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I have always fancied I had a kind of instinct about questions like this. I don't know if I can explain myself, but I used to use my brains as far as they went, and after they came to a blank wall I guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty right.

I was a peaceful sedentary man, a lover of a quiet life, with no appetite for perils and commotions. But I was beginning to realise that I was very obstinate.

Civilisation is a conspiracy.

To spend your days on such work when the world is chockful of amusing things. Life goes roaring by and you only hear the echo in your stuffy rooms.

What would you call the highest happiness? Wratislaw was asked. The sense of competence, was the answer, given without hesitation.

To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.

Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.

Our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven. For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he should know nothing. If he knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he will assuredly land in the soup.

I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.

He said that the great offensives of the future would be psychological, and he thought the Governments should get busy about it and prepare their defence... He considered that the most deadly weapon in the world was the power of mass-persuasion.

If you're going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing

If those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police-officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy.

I believe that every man has in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour.

London is like the tropical bush
if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.

Leadership is only courage and wisdom, and a great carefulness of self.

History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.

It was a strange staging for death, for the woman on the high bed was dying. Slowly, fighting every inch of the way with a grim tenacity, but indubitably dying. Her vital ardour had sunk below the mark from which it could rise again, and was now ebbing as water runs from a little crack in a pitcher.

Our sufferings have taught us that no nation is sufficient unto itself, and that our prosperity depends in the long run, not upon the failures of our neighbors but their successes.

That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.

The sea has formed the English character and the essential England is to be found in those who follow it. From blue waters they have learned mercifulness, and they have also learned - in the grimmest of schools - precision and resolution. The sea endures no makeshifts. If a thing is not exactly right it will be vastly wrong.

You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.

I would be content with any job, however thankless, in any quarter, however remote, if I had the chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and a solitary place glad.

(Thirty-nine steps)' was the phrase; and at its last time of use it ran - '(Thirty-nine steps, I counted them - high tide 10.17 p.m.)'. I could make nothing of that.

The more doubtful the political outlook the fiercer will be the dogmas which men create and contend for.