John Buchan Quotes
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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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There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness.
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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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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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It was foreordained that I should go alone to Umvelos', and in the promptings of my own infallible heart I believed I saw the workings of Omnipotence. Such is our moral arrogance, and yet without such a belief I think that mankind would have ever been content to bide sluggishly at home.
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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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There comes a time to everyone when the world narrows for him to a strait alley, with Death at the end of it, and all his thoughts are fixed on that waiting enemy of mankind.
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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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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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Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead.
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'You can help me to keep my head cool,' was the answer. 'You stand for the world of common sense which will always win in the long run. When I'm inclined to run amok you'll remind me of England. You'll lower the temperature.'
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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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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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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.
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He knew less about women than he knew about the physics of hyperspace.
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On the newspapers of the Craw Press: Their politics are an opiate to prevent folk thinking.
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Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future.
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I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.
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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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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 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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Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown.
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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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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.