John Buchan Quotes

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

The war had called forth the finest qualities of human nature, and with the advent of peace there seemed a risk of the world slipping back into a dull materialism. Men had begun to ask of everything its cash value, and to cherish, as if it were a virtue, a narrow utilitarian commonsense.

Let no man or woman call its events improbable. The war has driven that word from our vocabulary, and melodrama has become the prosiest realism.

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

Bethink you of the blessedness. Every wife is like the Mother of God—she has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind. She is the channel of the eternal purpose of Heaven.

To-day we have fewer dogmas, but I think that we have stronger principles. By a dogma I mean a deduction from facts which is only valid under certain conditions, and which becomes untrue if those conditions change. By a principle I mean something that is an eternal and universal truth.

"Jock put his shoulder to the framework and the whole thing crumbled inward with a crash of glass.
"Rotten as touch-wood," he said. "This place would never stand a siege.

Someone put a tea-tray on the table beside us, and I looked up to see the very prettiest girl I had ever set eyes on. She seemed little more than a child, and before the war would probably have still ranked as a flapper. She wore the neat blue dress and apron of a VAD, and her white cap was set on hair like spun gold. She smiled demurely as she arranged the tea-things, and I thought I had never seen eyes at once so merry and so grave. I stared after her as she walked across the lawn, and I remember noticing that she moved with the free grace of an athletic boy.

You don't know old Charles as I know him. He's got into a queer set, and there's no knowing what mischief he's up to. He's perfectly capable of starting a revolution in Armenia or somewhere merely to see how it feels like to be a revolutionary. That's the damned thing about the artistic temperament.

I was not a murderer, but I had become an unholy liar, a shameless impostor, and a highwayman with a marked taste for expensive motor-cars.

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

I incline to the belief that in the light of eternity all our truths are shadows, and that the very truth we shall only know hereafter. Yet I think that every truth in its own place is a substance, though it may be a shadow in another place. And I think that all such shadows have value for our souls, for each is a true shadow, as the substance is a true substance.

Some also have wished that the next way to their Father’s house were here, that they might be troubled no more with either hills or mountains to go over, but the Way is the Way, and there is an end.

I have to consider the honour of my house.'
'Honour?' Jaikie queried.
'Yes, honour,' said Ashie severely. 'Have you anything to say against it?'
'N-o-o. But it’s an awkward word and apt to obscure reason.'
'It is a very real thing, which you English do not understand.'
'We understand it well enough, but we are shy of talking about it.

I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view.