Quotes from John Buchan

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.

A fool tries to look different: a clever man looks the same and is different.

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.

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

Here were we wretched creatures of men making for each other's throats, and outraging the good earth which God had made so fair a habitation.

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

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

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

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.

Bethink you of the blessedness. Every wife is like the Mother of God and has the hope of bearing a saviour of mankind.

That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.

Without humility there can be no humanity.

[W]ithout humour you cannot run a sweetie-shop, let alone a nation.

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

It's a great life, if you don't weaken.

Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.

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

The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, but to live a life without purpose or meaning.

There is no barrier so strong as that of ignorance.

London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.

The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls.

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.

Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead.

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