"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."

"Perfect love casteth out fear, the Bible says; but, to speak it reverently, so does perfect hate."

"I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or how often that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt my sleep and disturb my waking hours."

"Time, they say, must the best of us capture, And travel and battle and gems and gold No more can kindle the ancient rapture, For even the youngest of hearts grows old."

"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 is a tempered and unerring weapon in the charge of a man's soul. And this end is to be achieved only by the exercise of the mind upon the largest possible manifold of experience, and by the conflict of character with the alien forces of the world."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

"We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves."

"The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there."

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

"The Scottish Communist is a much misunderstood person. When he is a true Caledonian, and not a Pole or an Irishman, he is simply the lineal descendant of the old Radical. The Scottish Radical was a man who held a set of inviolable principles on which he was entirely unable to compromise. It did not matter what the principles were; the point was that they were like the laws of Sinai, which could not be added to or subtracted from. When the Liberal party began to compromise, he joined Labour; when Labour began to compromise, by a natural transition he became a Communist. Temperamentally he has not changed. He is simply the stuff which in the seventeenth century made the unyielding Covenanter, and in the eighteenth the inflexible Jacobite. He is honesty incarnate, but his mind lacks flexibility."

"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."

"[On the newspapers of the Craw Press:] Their politics are an opiate to prevent folk thinking."

"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."

"[T]he Kirk of Scotland as at present guidit […] is a kind o' Papery wi' fifty Papes instead o' ane."

"I am a minister of Christ first and of the Kirk second. If the Kirk forgets its Master's teaching, we part company."

"[A] falsehood, which may be pardoned if it is to save another, is black sin if used by a coward to save himself."

"[T]here was never an army that did not accuse its enemies of barbarity."

"If the Kirk confines human nature too strictly, it will break out in secret ways, for men and women are born into a terrestrial world, though they have hopes of Heaven."

"And at times I'm tempted to think that our way and the Kirk's way is not God's way, for we're apt to treat the natural man as altogether corrupt, and put him under over-strict pains and penalties, whereas there's matter in him that might be shaped to the purposes of grace. If there's original sin, there's likewise original innocemce."

"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."

"Honest intention will not cure faulty practice."

"Now it was all behind him — but by God, he did not, he would not regret it. He had taken the only way, and if it had pleased Fate to sport cruelly with him, that was no fault of his. He had sacrificed one loyalty to a more urgent, and with the thought bitterness went out of his soul.[…] Tragedy had ensued, but the endeavour had been honest. He saw the ironic pattern of life spread out beneath him, as a man views a campaign from a mountain, and he came near to laughter — laughter with an undertone of tears."

"Too young for wife, too old for child, but the ripe age for comrade — and such a comrade, for there was a boy's gallantry in her eyes and something of a child's confident fearlessness."

"What can stand against loyalty? It is the faith that moves mountains."

"Boldness, and still boldness, was the only wisdom. To be cautious was to be rash."

"Statesmanship […] must consider first the fortunes of the common people. No statesman has a right to risk these fortunes unless he be reasonably assured of success."

"[L]oyalty and religion have many meanings, and self-interest is a skilled interpreter."

"I am nothing — a will-o'-the-wisp at your service — a clod of vivified dust whom its progenitors christened Amos Midwinter. I have no possession but my name, and no calling but that of philosopher. Naked I came from the earth, and naked I will return to it."

"He looked up startled, and saw in her face that which gave him a view into a strange new world. He had thought that women blushed when they talked of love, but her eyes were as grave and candid as a boy's. Here was one who had gone through waters so deep that she had lost the foibles of sex. Love to her was only a word of ill omen, a threat on the lips of brutes, an extra battalion of peril in an army of perplexities."

"Oh, it sounds ridiculous, I know, in Britain in the twentieth century, but I learned in the war that civilization anywhere is a very thin crust."

"And yet — and yet! He had done the right thing, though the Lord alone knew how it would end. He began to pluck courage from his very melancholy, and hope from his reflexions on the transitoriness of life. He was austerely following Romance as he conceived it, and if that capricious lady had taken one dream from him she might yet reward him with a better."

"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."

"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?"

"They[Australians]'ve all kinds of accents, but you can never mistake their voice. It's got the sun in it. Canadians have got grinding ice in theirs, and Virginians have got butter. So have the Irish. In Britain there are no voices, only speaking-tubes."

"Her voice had a thrill in it like music, frosty music."

"The clean delicate lines of her figure, the exquisite pure colouring of hair and skin, the charming young arrogance of the eyes — this was beauty, he reflected, a miracle, a revelation. Her virginal fineness and her dress, which was the tint of pale fire, gave her the air of a creature of ice and flame."

"They want to hurry things quicker than the Almighty means them to go. I don't altogether blame them either, for I'm mortally impatient myself. But it s no good thinking that saying a thing should be so will make it so. We're not the Creator of this universe. You've got to judge results according to your instruments."

"Most true points are fine points. There never was a dispute between mortals where both sides hadn't a bit of right."

"If the Lord sends us war, we have got to face it like men, but God forbid we should manufacture war, and use it as an escape from our domestic difficulties. You can't expect a blessing on that."

"The law and the constitution are like a child's pants. They've got to be made wider and longer as the child grows so as to fit him. If they're kept too tight, he'll burst them; and if you're in a hurry and make them too big all at once, they'll trip him up."

"Truth's like a dollar-piece, it's got two sides, and both are wanted to make it good currency."