John Buchan Quotes

138 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

John Buchan
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.

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

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

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

John Buchan
An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.

John Buchan
The spark once transmitted may smoulder for generations under ashes, but the appointed time will come, and it will flare up to warm the world. God never allows waste. And we fools rub our eyes and wonder, when we see genius come out of the gutter. It didn't begin there. We tell ourselves that Shakespeare was the son of a woolpedlar, and Napoleon of a farmer, and Luther of a peasant, and we hold up our hands at the marvel. But who knows what kings and prophets they had in their ancestry!

John Buchan
Truth's like a dollar-piece, it's got two sides, and both are wanted to make it good currency.

John Buchan
What do we mean by spiritual development? Surely, the broadening and deepening of the mind till it regards the world in its true perspective, and the strengthening of the character so that the will is a tempered and unerring weapon in the charge of a man's soul. And this end is to be achieved only by the exercise of the mind upon the largest possible manifold of experience, and by the conflict of character with the alien forces of the world.

John Buchan
You may hear people say that submarines have done away with the battleship, and that aircraft have annulled the mastery of the sea. That is what our pessimists say. But do you imagine that the clumsy submarine or the fragile aeroplane is really the last word of science?

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

John Buchan
On the newspapers of the Craw Press:
Their politics are an opiate to prevent folk thinking.

John Buchan
It's the Idea that wins every time — the Idea with brains and guts behind it.

John Buchan
The secret of life is to find out what one really wants.

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

John Buchan
The things we call aristocracies and reigning houses are the last places to look for masterful men. They began strongly, but they have been too long in possession. They have been cosseted and comforted and the devil has gone out of their blood. Don't imagine that I undervalue descent. It is not for nothing that a great man leaves posterity. But who is more likely to inherit the fire — the elder son with his flesh-pots or the younger son with his fortune to find?

John Buchan
Statesmanship […] must consider first the fortunes of the common people. No statesman has a right to risk these fortunes unless he be reasonably assured of success.

John Buchan
The Augustan constitution remains one of the major products of the human intelligence. It was a whole into which the parts fitted smoothly, but both whole and parts were elastic and capable of swift adaptation to unforeseen conditions. It was elaborate, but that was necessary, both because of its origin and its purpose.

John Buchan
Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.

John Buchan
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.

John Buchan
Happiness lies only in a divine unrest; and if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it.

John Buchan
They want to hurry things quicker than the Almighty means them to go. I don't altogether blame them either, for I'm mortally impatient myself. But it s no good thinking that saying a thing should be so will make it so. We're not the Creator of this universe. You've got to judge results according to your instruments.

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

John Buchan