John Buchan Quotes

It was a very young man's confession of faith, and yet there was the glimmering of a truth at the back of it. It was my instinctive protest against the undue simplification of life. We are all a strange compound, and we shall never reach our full stature by starving certain parts of our nature of their due.

[Y}outh is a hard judge.

Too young for wife, too old for child, but the ripe age for comrade — and such a comrade, for there was a boy's gallantry in her eyes and something of a child's confident fearlessness.

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

It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.

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.

[A] falsehood, which may be pardoned if it is to save another, is black sin if used by a coward to save himself.

If anyone makes trouble I've advised him to dot him one on the jaw in the best British style.

You can help me to keep my head cool,' was the answer. 'You stand for the world of common sense which will always win in the long run. When I'm inclined to run amok you'll remind me of England. You'll lower the temperature.

"Only by the possession of a sense of humour am I saved from insignificance." To

Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music.

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.

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

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

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