John Buchan
137 quotes
Biography
"The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope."
"The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things."
"The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there."
"We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves."
"The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls."
"Happiness lies only in a divine unrest; and if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it."
"The secret of life<!-- 42 --> is to find out what one really wants."
"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."
"It is only a dying cause which can attain to perfect taste."
"Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead."
"It was a very happy time, but like all happy times it had no landmarks."
"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."
"Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth."
"What do we mean by spiritual development? Surely, the broadening and deepening of the mind till it regards the world in its true perspective, and the strengthening of the character so that the will is a tempered and unerring weapon in the charge of a man's soul. And this end is to be achieved only by the exercise of the mind upon the largest possible manifold of experience, and by the conflict of character with the alien forces of the world."
"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."
"Perfect love casteth out fear, the Bible says; but, to speak it reverently, so does perfect hate."
"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."
"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."
"I believe that every man has in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour."
"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."
"Last night I had looked into the heart of darkness, and the sight had terrified me. What part should I play in the great purification? Most likely that of the Biblical scapegoat."
"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."
"How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus."
"I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view."
"I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality."