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

John Buchan

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John Buchan
Age: 64 †
Born: 1875
Born: August 26
Died: 1940
Died: February 11
Barrister
Biographer
Former Governor General Of Canada
Journalist
Military Personnel
Novelist
Poet
Politician
Science Fiction Writer
Perth
Scotland
John Buchan
1st Baron Tweedsmuir
Lord Tweedsmuir
Life
Consists
Caring
Rest
Wisdom
Passion
Right
Straw
Believe
Immensely
Things
Straws

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I always try to suit my clothes to my company. It is the only way to be inconspicuous.
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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.
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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.
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London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in.
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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.
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I would have been content with any job however thankless, in any quarter however remote, if I had a chance of making a corner of the desert blossom and the solitary place glad.
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Wise men never grow up indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth.
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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.
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What would you call the highest happiness, Lewie? he asked. The sense of competence, was the answer, given without hesitation.
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The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope.
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It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.
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Civilization is a conspiracy. Modern life is the silent compact of comfortable folk to keep up pretences.
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The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.
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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.
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That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.
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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.
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He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.
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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.
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Our sufferings have taught us that no nation is sufficient unto itself, and that our prosperity depends in the long run, not upon the failures of our neighbors but their successes.
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Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality.
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