John Buchan > Quotes

“He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.”
― John Buchan

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

“I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.”
― John Buchan

“A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.”
― John Buchan

“I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.”
― John Buchan

“I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.”
― John Buchan, The Power House

“We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.”
― John Buchan

“To spend your days on such work when the world is chockful of amusing things. Life goes roaring by and you only hear the echo in your stuffy rooms.”
― John Buchan, The Power House

“I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away.”
― John Buchan, Castle Gay

“But the big courage is the cold-blooded kind, the kind that never lets go even when you're feeling empty inside, and your blood's thin, and there's no kind of fun or profit to be had, and the trouble's not over in an hour or two but lasts for months and years.”
― John Buchan, John Buchan Trilogy: Mr Standfast, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle

“The men who knew that he knew what he knew had found him”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“If you’re going to be killed you invent some kind of flag and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to love the thing”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“It was a soft breathless June morning, with a promise of sultriness later...”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation 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 Satan.”
― John Buchan, The Power House

“This preoccupation with the classics was the happiest thing that could have befallen me. It gave me a standard of values. To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education. ... Faulty though my own practice has always been, I learned sound doctrine - the virtue of a clean, bare style, of simplicity, of a hard substance and an austere pattern. Above all the Calvinism of my boyhood was broadened, mellowed, and also confirmed. For if the classics widened my sense of the joy of life they also taught its littleness and transience; if they exalted the dignity of human nature they insisted upon its frailties and the aidos with which the temporal must regard the eternal. I lost then any chance of being a rebel, for I became profoundly conscious of the dominion of unalterable law. ... Indeed, I cannot imagine a more precious viaticum than the classics of Greece and Rome, or a happier fate than that one's youth should be intertwined with their world of clear, mellow lights, gracious images, and fruitful thoughts. They are especially valuable to those who believe that Time enshrines and does not destroy, and who do what I am attempting to do in these pages, and go back upon and interpret the past. No science or philosophy can give that colouring, for such provide a schematic, and not a living, breathing universe. And I do not think that the mastery of other literatures can give it in a like degree, for they do not furnish the same totality of life - a complete world recognisable as such, a humane world, yet one untouchable by decay and death...”
― John Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door: The Autobiography of John Buchan

“The eyes were of a color which he could never decide on, afterwards when he told the story he used to say they were the color of everything in Spring.”
― John Buchan, Huntingtower

“By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“يمكن لأكثر الناس سلاماً على الأرض أن يُقاد للقتال.”
― John Buchan, The Power House

“The more doubtful the political outlook the fiercer will be the dogmas which men create and contend for.”
― John Buchan, The Marquis of Montrose

“Capital," he said," had no conscience and no fatherland.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“My thoughts hovered over all varieties of mortal edible, and finally settled on a porterhouse steak and a quart of bitter with a welsh rabbit to follow. In longing hopelessly for these dainties I fell asleep.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“An old woman with a mutch sat in an arm-chair behind the counter. She looked up at me over her spectacles and smiled, and I took to her on the instant. She had the kind of old wise face that God loves.”
― John Buchan, Mr. Standfast

“الحضارة تحتاج إلى أكثر من القانون لتتماسك. كما ترى، لا يتساوى الناس فى قبول قوانين الحضارة.”
― John Buchan, The Power House

“I was not a murderer, but I had become an unholy liar, a shameless impostor, and a highwayman with a marked taste for expensive motor-cars.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“Pardon,' he said, 'I'm a bit rattled tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps

“All this was very loose guessing, and I don't pretend it was ingenious or scientific. I wasn't any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I have always fancied I had a kind of instinct about questions like this. I don't know if I can explain myself, but I used to use my brains as far as they went, and after they came to a blank wall I guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty right.”
― John Buchan, The 39 Steps