John Buchan Quotes
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Loyalty and religion have many meanings, and self-interest is a skilled interpreter.
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He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.
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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.
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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.
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A falsehood, which may be pardoned if it is to save another, is black sin if used by a coward to save himself.
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'Think,' I told him, 'what may be waiting for you. You may discover the meaning of Spirit. You may open up a new world, as rich as the old one, but imperishable. You may prove to mankind their immortality and deliver them for ever from the fear of death. Why, man, you are picking at the lock of all the world's mysteries.'
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The world was arrogant and self-satisfied, but behind all this confidence there was an uneasy sense of impending disaster. The old creeds, both religious and political, were largely in the process of dissolution, but we did not realise the fact, and therefore did not look for new foundations.
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Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music.
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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.
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We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.
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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.
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'I'm in the Lord's hands,' he said humbly. 'I'm but a penny whistle for His breath to blow on.' This he said with such solemnity that the meaning of a fanatic was suddenly revealed to me. One or two distorted notions, a wild imagination, and fierce passions, and there you have the ingredients ready.
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I must get off for a bit or I'll bonnet Joggleberry or get up and propose a national monument to Guy Fawkes or something silly.
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Mrs. Brisbane-Brown was a relic, but only the unthinking would have called her a snob. For snobbishness implies some sense of insecurity, and she was perfectly secure.
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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.
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Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.
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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.
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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.
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Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.
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Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.
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Time, they say, must the best of us capture,And travel and battle and gems and goldNo more can kindle the ancient rapture,For even the youngest of hearts grows old.
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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.
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Without humour you cannot run a sweetie-shop, let alone a nation.
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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.