John Buchan Quotes
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Leithen's story had bored and puzzled me at the start, but now it had somehow gripped my fancy. Space a domain of endless corridors and Presences moving in them! The world was not quite the same as an hour ago. It was the hour, as the French say, 'between dog and wolf,' when the mind is disposed to marvels.
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I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London. And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' you know.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.
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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.
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Supposing you knew - not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition - that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real - as real to the mind.
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Truth's like a dollar-piece, it's got two sides, and both are wanted to make it good currency.
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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.
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The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.
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TheyAustralians'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.
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I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.
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Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead.
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You don't know old Charles as I know him. He's got into a queer set, and there's no knowing what mischief he's up to. He's perfectly capable of starting a revolution in Armenia or somewhere merely to see how it feels like to be a revolutionary. That's the damned thing about the artistic temperament.
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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.
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There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness.
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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.
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Perfect love casteth out fear, the Bible says; but, to speak it reverently, so does perfect hate.
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To be watchful, I decided, was my business. And I could not get rid of the feeling that I might soon have cause for all my vigilance.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or how often that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt my sleep and disturb my waking hours.