John Buchan Quotes

138 Sourced Quotes

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

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

John Buchan
"It would scarcely be destruction," he replied gently. "Let us call it iconoclasm, the swallowing of formulas, which has always had its full retinue of idealists. And you do not want a Napoleon. All that is needed is direction, which could be given by men of far lower gifts than a Bonaparte. In a word, you want a Power-House, and then the age of miracles will begin."

John Buchan
Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead.

John Buchan
I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.

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

John Buchan
The Athenian empire lasted for fifty years at the most, and the stupendous creation of Alexander the Great for less. What has been the fate of succeeding imperialisms? That of Spain endured on the grand scale for little more than a century; that of Napoleon for a decade; the British Empire is less than two centuries old, and in its present form is a thing of yesterday. In the brief span of recorded history empires have had a shorter life than many monarchies, theocracies, and even republics. The Augustan alone reached a venerable age. In the coming of Christianity it had to face the greatest of all historic convulsions, but such was its potency that it weathered the storm and influenced profoundly the organization of the Christian church.

John Buchan
Every wife is like Mary the Blessed and may bear a saviour of mankind. The road is long, but the ways of Heaven are sure.

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

John Buchan
The law and the constitution are like a child's pants. They've got to be made wider and longer as the child grows so as to fit him. If they're kept too tight, he'll burst them; and if you're in a hurry and make them too big all at once, they'll trip him up.

John Buchan
The promise had not failed her.... She had won everything from life, for she had given the world a master. Words seemed to speak themselves in her ear.... "Bethink you of the blessedness. Every wife is like the Mother of God and has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind."

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

John Buchan
Boldness, and still boldness, was the only wisdom. To be cautious was to be rash.

John Buchan
He never went mad in your sense. My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you think there was anything pathological about him — then. The man was brilliantly sane. His mind was as keen as a keen sword. I couldn't understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough.

John Buchan
I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn't quite serious.

John Buchan
Public life is regarded as the crown of a career, and to young men it is the worthiest ambition. Politics is still the greatest and the most honorable adventure.

John Buchan
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.

John Buchan
It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.

John Buchan
He had never been lonely in his life before he met her, having at the worst found good company in himself; but now he longed for a companion, and out of all the many millions of the earth's inhabitants there was only one that he wanted.

John Buchan
History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.

John Buchan
This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in each world.

John Buchan
Have you ever considered what a diabolical weapon that can be—using all the channels of modern publicity to poison and warp men's minds? It is the most dangerous thing on earth…Happily, in the long run it defeats itself, but only after it has sown the world with mischief.

John Buchan
Oh, it sounds ridiculous, I know, in Britain in the twentieth century, but I learned in the war that civilization anywhere is a very thin crust.

John Buchan
A great storm destroys much that is precious, but it may also clear the air and blow down trees which might have been obscuring the view and making our life stuffy, and reveal in our estate possibilities of development that we had not thought of.

John Buchan
And yet — and yet! He had done the right thing, though the Lord alone knew how it would end. He began to pluck courage from his very melancholy, and hope from his reflexions on the transitoriness of life. He was austerely following Romance as he conceived it, and if that capricious lady had taken one dream from him she might yet reward him with a better.

John Buchan