Scottish novelist & politician (1875-1940)
The greatest tragedy in life is not to die, but to live a life without purpose or meaning.
JOHN BUCHAN
Salute to Adventurers
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.
JOHN BUCHAN
The Power-House
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.
JOHN BUCHAN
Witch Wood
There is no barrier so strong as that of ignorance.
JOHN BUCHAN
Prester John
Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.
JOHN BUCHAN
Augustus
I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.
JOHN BUCHAN
The 39 Steps
Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead.
JOHN BUCHAN
A Lodge in the Wilderness
To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
JOHN BUCHAN
Pilgrim's Way
Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.
JOHN BUCHAN
A Lodge in the Wilderness
London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.
JOHN BUCHAN
The Three Hostages
The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things.
JOHN BUCHAN
"The Wise Years", The Moon Endureth
The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls.
JOHN BUCHAN
A Lodge in the Wilderness
I venerate the intellect of man. I believe in its undreamed-of possibilities, when it grows free like an oak in the forest and is not dwarfed in a flower-pot. From that allegiance I have never wavered. That is the God I have never forsworn.
JOHN BUCHAN
The Power-House
The greatest happiness in life is the knowledge that we are loved and valued for what we are, not for what we have or what we can do.
JOHN BUCHAN
A Lodge in the Wilderness
It is not strength, but desire, that governs the world.
JOHN BUCHAN
Prester John
There is no greater weapon than knowledge, and no greater shield than wisdom.
JOHN BUCHAN
The Power-House
The true test of a man's character is not how he treats his friends, but how he treats his enemies.
JOHN BUCHAN
The Power-House
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.
JOHN BUCHAN
"Space", The Moon Endureth
I have known fellows to whom the earth was so full of little pleasures that after the worst clouts they rose like larks from a furrow. A wise philosophy--but I had none of it. I always saw the little pageant of man's life like a child's peep-show beside the dark wastes of eternity.
JOHN BUCHAN
The Path of the King
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.
JOHN BUCHAN
prologue, The Path of the King