Quotes from John Buchan

I get into a tearing passion about something I know very little about, and when I learn more my passion ebbs away.

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.

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

The men who knew that he knew what he knew had found him

It was a soft breathless June morning, with a promise of sultriness later...

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.

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.

By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is all pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.

Pardon,' he said, 'I'm a bit rattled tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead.

Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I had a fine prospect of the whole ring of moorland. I saw the car speed away with two occupants, and a man on a hill pony riding east. I judged they were looking for me, and I wished them joy of their quest.

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

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.

'What would you call the highest happiness?' Wratislaw was asked. 'The sense of competence,' was the answer, given without hesitation.

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

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

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

I believe that all wisdom consists in caring immensely for a few right things, and not caring a straw about the rest.

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

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