Best 259 quotes of Robertson Davies on MyQuotes

Robertson Davies

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    Robertson Davies

    A big man is always accused of gluttony, whereas a wizened or osseous man can eat like a refugee at every meal, and no one ever notices his greed.

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    Robertson Davies

    After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.

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    Robertson Davies

    A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.

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    Robertson Davies

    A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

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    Robertson Davies

    A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.

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    Robertson Davies

    All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.

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    Robertson Davies

    All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

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    Robertson Davies

    All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children.

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    Robertson Davies

    Although I am almost illiterate mathematically, I grasped very early in life that any one who can count to ten can count upward indefinitely if he is fool enough to do so.

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    Robertson Davies

    Although there may be nothing new under the sun, what is old is new to us and so rich and astonishing that we never tire of it. If we do tire of it, if we lose our curiosity, we have lost something of infinite value, because to a high degree it is curiosity that gives meaning and savour to life.

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    Robertson Davies

    A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.

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    Robertson Davies

    A man who recognizes no God is probably placing an inordinate value on himself.

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    Robertson Davies

    And I say to you that if you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.

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    Robertson Davies

    And why should it not be terrifying? A little terror, in my view, is good for the soul, when it is terror in the face of a noble object.

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    Robertson Davies

    Anybody who has had experience of poetesses knows that they may forgive a punch on the jaw, but never a suggestion that they would be wiser to give up versifying.

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    Robertson Davies

    Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things the job, the house, the this, the that do not really fill the place inside.

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    Robertson Davies

    Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

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    Robertson Davies

    Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew.

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    Robertson Davies

    Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.

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    Robertson Davies

    As the tragic writer rids us of what is petty and ignoble in our nature, so also the humorist rids us of what is cautious, calculating, and priggish--about half of our social conscience, indeed. Both of them permit us, in blessed moments of revelation, to soar above the common level of our lives.

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    Robertson Davies

    Be sure to choose what you believe and why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very credible one, will choose you.

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    Robertson Davies

    Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines - not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.

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    Robertson Davies

    Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.

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    Robertson Davies

    But as a skeptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a skeptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding.

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    Robertson Davies

    Canada has one of the highest rates of insanity in any civilized country and one reason might be that life in many places is so desperately dull.

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    Robertson Davies

    Canada, having few indigenous prejudices, has been compelled to import them from elsewhere, duty-free, and it is the rare Canadian who is not shaken, at some time in the year, by "old, unhappy, far-off things / And battles long ago", like Wordsworth's solitary reaper. We are a nation of immigrants, and not happy in our minds.

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    Robertson Davies

    Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.

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    Robertson Davies

    Canada was settled, in the main, by people with a lower middle-class outlook, and a respect, rather than an affectionate familiarity, for the things of the mind.

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    Robertson Davies

    Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.

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    Robertson Davies

    "Children, don't speak so coarsely," said Mr Webster, who had a vague notion that some supervision should be exercised over his daughters' speech, and that a line should be drawn, but never knew quite when to draw it. He had allowed his daughters to use his library without restraint, and nothing is more fatal to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.

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    Robertson Davies

    "Civilization rests on two things," said Hitzig; "the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?

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    Robertson Davies

    Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

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    Robertson Davies

    Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests. In the minds of politicians, perhaps more than anywhere, the notion of a million dollars has this accordion-like ability to expand or contract; if they are disposing of it, the million is a pleasing sum, reflecting warmly upon themselves; if somebody else wants it, it becomes a figure of inordinate size, not to be compassed by the rational mind.

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    Robertson Davies

    Comparatively few people know what a million dollars actually is. To the majority it is a gaseous concept, swelling or decreasing as the occasion suggests.

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    Robertson Davies

    Computers will have to learn that when I quote from some old author who spelled differently from the machine, the wishes of the long-dead author will have to be respected, and the machine will have to mind its manners

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    Robertson Davies

    Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.

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    Robertson Davies

    Curiosity is part of the cement that holds society together.

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    Robertson Davies

    Did you know that Puritanism went hand in hand with dirt, that Oliver Cromwell put a 100 per cent tax on soap and that the repeal of the soap tax was one of the most popular acts of Charles II at his Restoration?

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    Robertson Davies

    Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.

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    Robertson Davies

    Energy and curiosity are the lifeblood of universities; the desire to find out, to uncover, to dig deeper, to puzzle out obscurities, is the spirit of the university, and it is a channelling of that unresting curiosity that holds mankind together.

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    Robertson Davies

    Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

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    Robertson Davies

    Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.

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    Robertson Davies

    Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.

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    Robertson Davies

    Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.

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    Robertson Davies

    Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.

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    Robertson Davies

    Female beauty is an important Minor Sacrament which cannot be received too often; I am not at all sure that neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind.

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    Robertson Davies

    Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.

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    Robertson Davies

    Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.

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    Robertson Davies

    Great drama, drama that may reach the alchemical level, must have dimension and its relevance will take care of itself. Writing about AIDS rather than the cocktail set, or possibly the fairy kingdom, will not guarantee importance. . . . The old comment that all periods of time are at an equal distance from eternity says much, and pondering on it will lead to alchemical theatre while relevance becomes old hat.

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    Robertson Davies

    Happiness is a by-product. It is not a primary product of life. It is a thing which you suddenly realize you have because you're so delighted to be doing something which perhaps has nothing whatever to do with happiness.