John Buchan Quotes

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.

I seek above all things to bring men and women to God's mercy-seat.

I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.

My poalitics is just an auld wife's poalitics that wants to be left in peace by her fireside…

What can stand against loyalty? It is the faith that moves mountains.

I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or how often that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt my sleep and disturb my waking hours.

الحضارة تحتاج إلى أكثر من القانون لتتماسك. كما ترى، لا يتساوى الناس فى قبول قوانين الحضارة.

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.

What does a woman desire?' she asked, speaking as if to herself, and her voice was soft as she gazed over the valley. 'Men think it is a handsome face or a brisk air or a smooth tongue. And some will have it that it is a deep purse or a high station. But I think it is the honest heart that goes all the way with a woman's love. We are not so blind as to believe that the glitter is the gold. We love romance, but we seek it in its true home.

Sir Archibald looked upon the earnest flushed face of Dickson with admiration. “I’m blessed if you’re not the most whole-hearted brigand I’ve ever struck.”“I’m not. I’m just a business man.”
“Do you realize that you’re levying a private war and breaking every law of the land?”
“Hoots!” said Dickson. “I don’t care a docken about the law. I’m for seeing this job through. What force can you produce?”
“Only cripples , I’m afraid.

I loathed having to screw myself up to emergencies late in the day. Such things should take place in the early morning. It was like going over the top in France; I didn’t mind it so much when it happened during a drizzling dawn, when one was anyhow depressed and only half-awake, but I abominated an attack in the cold-blooded daylight, or in the dusk when one wanted to relax.

[W]ithout humour you cannot run a sweetie-shop, let alone a nation.

If the Kirk confines human nature too strictly, it will break out in secret ways, for men and women are born into a terrestrial world, though they have hopes of Heaven.

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.

The profession of religion was not the same thing as godliness, and he was coming to doubt whether the insistence upon minute conformities of outward conduct and the hair-splitting doctrines were not devices of Satan to entangle souls.