John Buchan citations (145 citations, Page 2)

John Buchan: 145 citations 0 J'aime

John Buchan: Citations en anglais

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

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John Buchan

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 58
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

“I have heard an atheist defined as a man who had no invisible means of support.”

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John Buchan

A play on words commonly used referring to vagrants or paupers as having "no visible means of support" financially, speaking to the Law Society of Upper Canada, (21 February 1936); published in Canadian Occasions (1940), p. 201. Buchan's source for this definition remains unknown. The witticism was repeated by Harry Emerson Fosdick in his On Being a Real Person (1943), ch. 1, with due acknowledgement to Buchan, and was again used by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen in Look magazine (December 14, 1955). The credit for this line is therefore often wrongly given to Fosdick or to Sheen. Credit has also been given to the conductor Walter Damrosch (1862-1950).
Canadian Occasions (1940)

“I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”

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John Buchan

Source: The 39 Steps

“It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.”

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John Buchan

Source: The 39 Steps

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

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John Buchan

Pilgrim's Way (1940), p. 241
Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

“What can stand against loyalty? It is the faith that moves mountains.”

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John Buchan

Source: Midwinter (1923), Ch. X

“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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John Buchan livre The Path of the King

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

“They[Australians]'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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John Buchan livre Huntingtower

Source: Huntingtower (1922), Ch. 2

“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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John Buchan livre The Power-House

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

“The Augustan constitution remains one of the major products of the human intelligence. It was a whole into which the parts fitted smoothly, but both whole and parts were elastic and capable of swift adaptation to unforeseen conditions. It was elaborate, but that was necessary, both because of its origin and its purpose.”

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John Buchan

Augustus (1937)

“Now that the once omnipotent Liberal party has so declined, it is hard to realise how formidable it was in 1911—especially in Scotland. Its dogmas were so completely taken for granted that their presentation partook less of argument than of a tribal incantation. Mr. Gladstone had given it an aura of earnest morality, so that its platforms were also pulpits and its harangues had the weight of sermons. Its members seemed to assume that their opponents must be lacking either in morals or mind. The Tories were the "stupid" party; Liberals alone understood and sympathised with the poor; a working man who was not a Liberal was inaccessible to reason, or morally corrupt, or intimidated by laird or employer. I remember a lady summing up the attitude thus: Tories may think they are better born, but Liberals know that they are born better.”

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John Buchan

Memory Hold-The-Door (1940)

“The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.”

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John Buchan

"The Wise Years", The Moon Endureth (1912)

“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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John Buchan livre The Power-House

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

“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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John Buchan livre Prester John

Source: Prester John (1910), Ch. X

“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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John Buchan livre Huntingtower

Source: Huntingtower (1922), Ch. 9

“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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John Buchan livre The House of the Four Winds

Prologue
The House of the Four Winds (1935)

“Boldness, and still boldness, was the only wisdom. To be cautious was to be rash.”

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John Buchan

Source: Midwinter (1923), Ch. X

“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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John Buchan livre Salute to Adventurers

Source: Salute to Adventurers (1915), Ch. 3 "The Canongate Tollbooth"

“Of course he could only describe his impressions very lamely, for they were purely of the mind, and he had no material peg to hang them on, so that I could realise them. But the gist of it was that he had been gradually becoming conscious of what he called 'Presences' in his world. They had no effect on Space — did not leave footprints in its corridors, for instance — but they affected his mind. There was some mysterious contact established between him and them. I asked him if the affection was unpleasant and he said 'No, not exactly.”

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John Buchan

But I could see a hint of fear in his eyes.
Space (1912)

“Truth's like a dollar-piece, it's got two sides, and both are wanted to make it good currency.”

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John Buchan livre The Path of the King

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

“He was a bad acquaintance for a placid, sedentary soul like me, for though he could work like a Trojan when the fit took him, he was never at the same job very long. In the same week he would harass an Under-Secretary about horses for the Army, write voluminously to the press about a gun he had invented for potting aeroplanes, give a fancy-dress ball which he forgot to attend, and get into the semi-final of the racquets championship. I waited daily to see him start a new religion.”

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John Buchan livre The Power-House

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

“The best prayers have often more groans than words.”

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John Buchan

This has also been attributed to Buchan, but is again from John Bunyan, Discourse on Prayer.
Misattributed

“I dropped all my own views of sense and nonsense. I told him that, taking all that he had told me as fact, the Presences might be either ordinary minds traversing Space in sleep; or minds such as his which had independently captured the sense of Space's quality; or, finally, the spirits of just men made perfect, behaving as psychical researchers think they do. It was a ridiculous task to set a prosaic man, and I wasn't quite serious.”

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John Buchan

Space (1912)

“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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John Buchan livre The Power-House

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

“In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility.”

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John Buchan livre A Lodge in the Wilderness

Source: A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906), Ch. III, p. 69

“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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John Buchan livre Huntingtower

Source: Huntingtower (1922), Ch. 6

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

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John Buchan

Address to the people of Canada on the coronation of George VI (12 May 1937)

“We look for romance in the well-cultivated garden-plots, and when it springs out of virgin soil we are surprised, though any fool might know it was the natural place for it.”

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John Buchan livre The Path of the King

Prologue
The Path of the King (1921)

“Prayer opens the heart to God, and it is the means by which the soul, though empty, is filled by God.”

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John Buchan

This has similarly been attributed to Buchan, but is actually a misrendering of a sentence from the first paragraph of John Bunyan, Discourse on Prayer. Bunyan's original sentence reads: "It is the opener of the heart of God, and a means by which the soul, though empty, is filled."
Misattributed