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John Buchan

139 quotes

“Civilisation is a conspiracy. What value would your police be if every criminal could find a sanctuary across the Channel, or your law courts, if no other tribunal recognised their decisions? Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences. And it will succeed till the day comes when there is another compact to strip them bare.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I read now and then in the papers that some eminent scientist had made a great discovery. He reads a paper before some Academy of Science, and there are leading articles on it, and his photograph adorns the magazines. That kind of man is not the danger. He is a bit of the machine, a party to the compact. It is the men who stand outside it that are to be reckoned with, the artists in discovery who will never use their knowledge till they can use it with full effect.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You see only the productions of second-rate folk who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I cannot pry into motives. I only know of the existence of great extra-social intelligences. Let us say that they distrust the machine. They may be idealists and desire to make a new world, or they may simply be artists, loving for its own sake the pursuit of truth. If I were to hazard a guess, I should say that it took both types to bring about results, for the second find the knowledge and the first the will to use it.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If those extra-social brains are so potent, why after all do they effect so little? A dull police-officer, with the machine behind him, can afford to laugh at most experiments in anarchy.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I felt myself in the presence of something enormously big, as if a small barbarian was desecrating the colossal Zeus of Pheidias with a coal hammer. But I also felt it inhuman, and I hated it, and I clung to that hatred. "You fear nothing and you believe nothing," I said. "Man, you should never have been allowed to live.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am a sceptic about most things... but, believe me, I have my own worship. I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We look for romance in the well-cultivated garden-plots, and when it springs out of virgin soil we are surprised, though any fool might know it was the natural place for it.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We none of us know our ancestors beyond a little way. We all of us may have kings' blood in our veins.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bethink you of the blessedness. Every wife is like the Mother of God—she has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind. She is the channel of the eternal purpose of Heaven.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think a man cannot strive wholeheartedly with an enemy unless he have much in common with him, and as the strife goes on he gets liker.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have known fellows to whom the earth was so full of little pleasures that after the worst clouts they rose like larks from a furrow. A wise philosophy—but I had none of it. I always saw the little pageant of man's life like a child's peep-show beside the dark wastes of eternity.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truth's like a dollar-piece, it's got two sides, and both are wanted to make it good currency.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the Lord sends us war, we have got to face it like men, but God forbid we should manufacture war, and use it as an escape from our domestic difficulties. You can't expect a blessing on that.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The clean delicate lines of her figure, the exquisite pure colouring of hair and skin, the charming young arrogance of the eyes — this was beauty, he reflected, a miracle, a revelation. Her virginal fineness and her dress, which was the tint of pale fire, gave her the air of a creature of ice and flame.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They[Australians]'ve all kinds of accents, but you can never mistake their voice. It's got the sun in it. Canadians have got grinding ice in theirs, and Virginians have got butter. So have the Irish. In Britain there are no voices, only speaking-tubes.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What had become of his dream of idylls, his gentle bookish romance? Vanished before a reality which smacked horribly of crude melodrama and possibly of sordid crime. His gorge rose at the picture, but a thought troubled him. Perhaps all romance in its hour of happening was rough and ugly like this, and only shone rosy in the retrospect. Was he being false to his deepest faith?”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was as if he were watching a tall stranger with a wand pointing to the embarrassed phantom that was himself, and ruthlessly exposing its frailties! And yet that pitiless showman was himself too — himself as he wanted to be, cheerful, brave, resourceful, indomitable.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He looked up startled, and saw in her face that which gave him a view into a strange new world. He had thought that women blushed when they talked of love, but her eyes were as grave and candid as a boy's. Here was one who had gone through waters so deep that she had lost the foibles of sex. Love to her was only a word of ill omen, a threat on the lips of brutes, an extra battalion of peril in an army of perplexities.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am nothing — a will-o'-the-wisp at your service — a clod of vivified dust whom its progenitors christened Amos Midwinter. I have no possession but my name, and no calling but that of philosopher. Naked I came from the earth, and naked I will return to it.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[L]oyalty and religion have many meanings, and self-interest is a skilled interpreter.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Boldness, and still boldness, was the only wisdom. To be cautious was to be rash.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can stand against loyalty? It is the faith that moves mountains.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now it was all behind him — but by God, he did not, he would not regret it. He had taken the only way, and if it had pleased Fate to sport cruelly with him, that was no fault of his. He had sacrificed one loyalty to a more urgent, and with the thought bitterness went out of his soul.[…] Tragedy had ensued, but the endeavour had been honest. He saw the ironic pattern of life spread out beneath him, as a man views a campaign from a mountain, and he came near to laughter — laughter with an undertone of tears.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Honest intention will not cure faulty practice.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And at times I'm tempted to think that our way and the Kirk's way is not God's way, for we're apt to treat the natural man as altogether corrupt, and put him under over-strict pains and penalties, whereas there's matter in him that might be shaped to the purposes of grace. If there's original sin, there's likewise original innocemce.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]here was never an army that did not accuse its enemies of barbarity.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[A] falsehood, which may be pardoned if it is to save another, is black sin if used by a coward to save himself.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am a minister of Christ first and of the Kirk second. If the Kirk forgets its Master's teaching, we part company.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he Kirk of Scotland as at present guidit […] is a kind o' Papery wi' fifty Papes instead o' ane.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He knew nothing accurately about any subject in the world, but he could clothe his ignorance in pontifical garments and give his confusion the accents of authority. He had a remarkable flair for discerning and elaborating the tiny quantum of popular knowledge on any matter.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[On the newspapers of the Craw Press:] Their politics are an opiate to prevent folk thinking.”
John Buchan (1875–1940) said by 1940 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source