John Buchan (1875 – 1940)
Scottish novelist, poet, and politician; he was Governor-General of Canada from 1935 to 1940.
What had become of his dream of idylls, his gentle bookish romance? Vanished before a reality which smacked horribly of crude melodrama and possibly of sordid crime. His gorge rose at the picture, but a thought troubled him. Perhaps all romance in its hour of happening was rough and ugly like this, and only shone rosy in the retrospect. Was he being false to his deepest faith?
Truth's like a dollar-piece, it's got two sides, and both are wanted to make it good currency.
The best prayers have often more groans than words.
Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music.
Happiness lies only in a divine unrest; and if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it.
Generations follow, oblivious of the high beginnings, but there is that in the stock which is fated to endure. The sons and daughters blunder and sin and perish, but the race goes on, for there is a fierce stuff of life in it. It sinks and rises again and blossoms at haphazard into virtue or vice, since the ordinary moral laws do not concern its mission. Some rags of greatness always cling to it, the dumb faith that sometime and somehow that blood drawn from kings it never knew will be royal again. Though nature is wasteful of material things, there is no waste of spirit. And then after long years there comes, unheralded and unlooked-for, the day of the Appointed Time...
To live for a time close to great minds is the best kind of education.
I believe that every man has in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour.
Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law.
It was as if he were watching a tall stranger with a wand pointing to the embarrassed phantom that was himself, and ruthlessly exposing its frailties! And yet that pitiless showman was himself too — himself as he wanted to be, cheerful, brave, resourceful, indomitable.
The true definition of a snob is one who craves for what separates men rather than for what unites them.
History does not repeat itself except with variations, and it is idle to look for exact parallels, but we can trace a resemblance between the conditions of his time and those of to-day. Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin, and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires. Once again many accepted principles of government have been overthrown, and the world has become a laboratory where immature and feverish minds experiment with unknown forces. Once again problems cannot be comfortably limited, for science has brought the nations into an uneasy bondage to each other. In the actual business of administration there is no question of today which Augustus had not to face and answer.
Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right.
Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.
We had our pride shattered, and without humility there can be no humanity.
Mrs. Brisbane-Brown was a relic, but only the unthinking would have called her a snob. For snobbishness implies some sense of insecurity, and she was perfectly secure.
You don't know old Charles as I know him. He's got into a queer set, and there's no knowing what mischief he's up to. He's perfectly capable of starting a revolution in Armenia or somewhere merely to see how it feels like to be a revolutionary. That's the damned thing about the artistic temperament.
He knew nothing accurately about any subject in the world, but he could clothe his ignorance in pontifical garments and give his confusion the accents of authority. He had a remarkable flair for discerning and elaborating the tiny quantum of popular knowledge on any matter.
The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls.
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.