John Buchan Quotes

Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man.

Light-hearted or light-headed, I know not which I was, but I know that I had no fear.

What’s dooty, if you won’t carry it to the other side of Hell? What’s the use of yapping about your country if you’re going to keep something back when she calls for it? What’s the good of meaning to win the war if you don’t put every cent you’ve got on your stake?... No, Dick, that kind of dooty don’t deserve a blessing. You dursn’t keep anything back if you want to save your soul.

The Unknown, happily, will be always with us, for there are infinite secrets in a blade of grass, and an eddy of wind, and a grain of dust , and human knowledge will never attain that finality when the sense of wonder shall cease.

Don't be afraid. This is going to be a very peaceful party.

'I'm in the Lord's hands,' he said humbly. 'I'm but a penny whistle for His breath to blow on.' This he said with such solemnity that the meaning of a fanatic was suddenly revealed to me. One or two distorted notions, a wild imagination, and fierce passions, and there you have the ingredients ready.

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.

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.

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.

[W]isdom is apt to cohabit with oddity.

though I was afraid of many things, the thing I feared most mortally was being afraid. I

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.

I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.

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.

The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls.