John Buchan Quotes page 2

“What does a woman desire?' she asked, speaking as if to herself, and her voice was soft as she gazed over the valley. 'Men think it is a handsome face or a brisk air or a smooth tongue. And some will have it that it is a deep purse or a high station. But I think it is the honest heart that goes all the way with a woman's love. We are not so blind as to believe that the glitter is the gold. We love romance, but we seek it in its true home.”

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 1 "Beginning of the Wild-Goose Chase"

John Buchan book Salute to Adventurers

Source: Salute to Adventurers (1915), Ch. 28 "How Three Souls Found Their Heritage"

“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?”

“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.”

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"

“Oh, I agree he went mad in the end. It is the only explanation. Something must have snapped in that fine brain, and he saw the little bit more which we call madness. Thank God, you and I are prosaic fellows…”

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. XIV "The End of the Road", II

“There come moments to every man when he is thankful to be alive, and every breath drawn is a delight; so at that hour I praised my Maker for His good earth, and for sparing me to rejoice in it.”

Space (1912)

John Buchan book Salute to Adventurers

Source: Salute to Adventurers (1915), Ch. 16 "The Ford of the Rapidan"

“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.”

“Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music.”

Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. X, p. 272

John Buchan book Huntingtower

Prologue
Huntingtower (1922)

“Our sufferings have taught us that no nation is sufficient unto itself, and that our prosperity depends in the long run, not upon the failure of our neighbors but their successes.”

“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?”

"A University's Bequest to Youth" (10 October 1936)
Canadian Occasions (1940)

“I mused upon the ironic fate which had compelled a mathematical genius to make his sole confidant of a philistine lawyer, and induced that lawyer to repeat it confusedly to an ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill.”

Prologue
The Path of the King (1921)

“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.”

Space (1912)

“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.”

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. VIII "The Hidden City"

“Time, they say, must the best of us capture,
And travel and battle and gems and gold
No more can kindle the ancient rapture,
For even the youngest of hearts grows old.”

Source: Witch Wood (1927), Ch. VIII "The Second Blast"

“There may be Peace without Joy, and Joy without Peace, but the two combined make Happiness.”

Dedication
Prester John (1910)

“I believe that every man has in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour.”

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 117
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

“Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.”

Source: Prester John (1910), Ch. X

“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.”

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. XIV "The End of the Road", II

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 6

“[A] falsehood, which may be pardoned if it is to save another, is black sin if used by a coward to save himself.”

“Perfect love casteth out fear, the Bible says; but, to speak it reverently, so does perfect hate.”

Source: Witch Wood (1927), Ch. XIV "The Counterblast"

“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.”

Source: Prester John (1910), Ch. IX

“It was a very happy time, but like all happy times it had no landmarks.”

Source: Prester John (1910), Ch. X

“I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.”

Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. X, p. 268

“Peace is that state in which fear of any kind is unknown.”

Prologue
The House of the Four Winds (1935)

“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.”

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 117
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

“He knew less about women than he knew about the physics of hyperspace.”

Source: Midwinter (1923), Ch. II

“He never went mad in your sense. My dear fellow, you're very much wrong if you think there was anything pathological about him — then. The man was brilliantly sane. His mind was as keen as a keen sword. I couldn't understand him, but I could judge of his sanity right enough.”

Source: The House of the Four Winds (1935), Ch. XI

“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.”

Space (1912)

“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.”

Source: Midwinter (1923), Ch. XVII

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

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. XIV "The End of the Road", I

“Honest intention will not cure faulty practice.”

Montrose and Leadership (1930), p 24; republished in Men and Deeds (1977)

“He realised how oddly detached he was. […] He enjoyed every moment, but he knew that his enjoyment came largely from standing a little apart. He was not a cynic, for there was no sourness in him. He had a kindliness towards most things, and a large charity. But he did not take sides. He had not accepted any mood, or creed, or groove of his own. Vix ea nostra voco [I scarcely call these things our own] was his motto. He was only a seeker […] occupied in finding out what was in his soul.”

Source: Witch Wood (1927), Ch. III "Guests in Calidon Tower"

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 20

“[L]oyalty and religion have many meanings, and self-interest is a skilled interpreter.”

“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.”

Source: Midwinter (1923), Ch. I

“The Scottish Communist is a much misunderstood person. When he is a true Caledonian, and not a Pole or an Irishman, he is simply the lineal descendant of the old Radical. The Scottish Radical was a man who held a set of inviolable principles on which he was entirely unable to compromise. It did not matter what the principles were; the point was that they were like the laws of Sinai, which could not be added to or subtracted from. When the Liberal party began to compromise, he joined Labour; when Labour began to compromise, by a natural transition he became a Communist. Temperamentally he has not changed. He is simply the stuff which in the seventeenth century made the unyielding Covenanter, and in the eighteenth the inflexible Jacobite. He is honesty incarnate, but his mind lacks flexibility.”

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 3 "Tells of a Midsummer Night"

John Buchan book Castle Gay

Source: Castle Gay (1930), Ch. 14

“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."”

“Every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.”

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 8 "The Power-House"

“If anyone makes trouble I've advised him to dot him one on the jaw in the best British style.”

Source: The Power-House (1916), Ch. 2 "I First Hear Of Mr Andrew Lumley"

“We none of us know our ancestors beyond a little way. We all of us may have kings' blood in our veins.”

Source: The House of the Four Winds (1935), Ch. III

“[T]he Kirk of Scotland as at present guidit […] is a kind o' Papery wi' fifty Papes instead o' ane.”

Prologue
The Path of the King (1921)

“We had our pride shattered, and without humility there can be no humanity.”

Source: Witch Wood (1927), Ch. XVII "Woodilee and Calidon"

“I never mind choler in a man if he have also honesty and good sense.”

"A University's Bequest to Youth" (10 October 1936)
Canadian Occasions (1940)

John Buchan book Salute to Adventurers

Source: Salute to Adventurers (1915), Ch. 6 "Tells of My Education"

“Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.”

“To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.”

Augustus (1937)

“It is only a dying cause which can attain to perfect taste.”

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 26
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

“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.”

Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. III, p. 83

“It's the Idea that wins every time — the Idea with brains and guts behind it.”

Source: Witch Wood (1927), Ch. X "What the Moon Saw"

“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.”

Envoi
The House of the Four Winds (1935)

“The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda's Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers.”

Source: The Path of the King (1921), Ch. V "The Maid"

“Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.”

Source: Prester John (1910), Ch. IX