“I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.”

— John Buchan

bravery fortitude knives loyalty

“It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.”

— John Buchan

democracy equality

“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.”

— John Buchan

color eyes spring

“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”

— John Buchan

country

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

— John Buchan

passion heart

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

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

“Happiness lies only in a divine unrest; and if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it.”

— John Buchan

“The secret of life is to find out what one really wants.”

— John Buchan

“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.”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

“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 st...”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

“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...”

— John Buchan