Top 60 John Buchan Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

3. “The Church of Christ is an anvil which has worn out many hammers. Our opponents may boast of their strength, but they do not realize what they have challenged.”

— John Buchan

4. “Without humility there can be no humanity.”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

6. “There may be peace without joy, and joy without peace, but the two combined make happiness.”

— John Buchan

7. “An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support.”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

10. “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

11. “Leadership is only courage and wisdom, and a great carefulness of self.”

— John Buchan

12. “History gives us a kind of chart, and we dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it.”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

14. “Pessimism is the one ism which kills the soul.”

— John Buchan

15. “He who would valiant be against all disaster; let him in constancy follow the Master. There’s no discouragement shall make him once relent; his first avowed intent to be a pilgrim.”

— John Buchan

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

16. “Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

18. “Pardon,′ he said, ‘I’m a bit rattled tonight. You see, I happen at this moment to be dead.”

— John Buchan

19. “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.”

— John Buchan

20. “It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.”

— John Buchan

21. “I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”

— John Buchan

22. “To see what is right and not to do it is cowardice. It is never a question of who is right but what is right.”

— John Buchan

23. “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

24. “You may hear people say that submarines have done away with the battleship, and that aircraft have annulled the mastery of the sea. That is what our pessimists say. But do you imagine that the clumsy submarine or the fragile aeroplane is really the last word of science?”

— John Buchan

25. “I believe that every man has in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour.”

— John Buchan

26. “You see only the productions of second-rate folk who are in a hurry to get wealth and fame. The true knowledge, the deadly knowledge, is still kept secret. But, believe me, my friend, it is there.”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

29. “A little thing, lasting only a second, and the odds were a thousand to one that I might have had my eyes on my cards at the time and missed it. But I didn’t, and, in a flash, the air seemed to clear. Some shadow lifted from my brain, and I was looking at the three men with full and absolute recognition.”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

31. “The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda’s Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers.”

— John Buchan

32. “I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality.”

— John Buchan

33. “When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.”

— John Buchan

34. “I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.”

— John Buchan

35. “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

36. “Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.”

— John Buchan

37. “The book trade is a spiritual barometer of a nations well-being.”

— John Buchan

38. “But some love not the method of your first; Romance they count it, throw’t away as dust; If I should meet with such, what should I say; Must I slight them as they slight me, or nay.”

— John Buchan

Featured in: Firsts Quotes, Romance Quotes

39. “The world was arrogant and self-satisfied, but behind all this confidence there was an uneasy sense of impending disaster. The old creeds, both religious and political, were largely in the process of dissolution, but we did not realise the fact, and therefore did not look for new foundations.”

— John Buchan

40. “The secret belongs only to the Maker of good and faithful dogs.”

— John Buchan

41. “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.”

— John Buchan

42. “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.”

— John Buchan

43. “We must all be fighters and strugglers, Lewie, and it is better to wear out than to rust out. It is bad to let choice things become easily familiar; for, you know, familiarity is apt to beget a proverbial offspring.” The.”

— John Buchan

44. “Our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven. For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he should know nothing. If he knows one fact only, instead of profiting by it he will assuredly land in the soup.”

— John Buchan

45. “Civilisation is a conspiracy.”

— John Buchan

46. “It was foreordained that I should go alone to Umvelos’, and in the promptings of my own infallible heart I believed I saw the workings of Omnipotence. Such is our moral arrogance, and yet without such a belief I think that mankind would have ever been content to bide sluggishly at home.”

— John Buchan

47. “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.”

— John Buchan

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

— John Buchan

Featured in: Romance Quotes

49. “Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn’t a bit of right.”

— John Buchan

50. “I would be content with any job, however thankless, in any quarter, however remote, if I had the chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and a solitary place glad.”

— John Buchan