Top 100 Robertson Davies Quotes
#1. There is more to marriage than four bare legs under a blanket.
Robertson Davies
#2. I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is [the doctors'] symbol.
Robertson Davies
#3. He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.
Robertson Davies
#4. The people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so ... That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity.
Robertson Davies
#5. If a man wants to be of the greatest possible value to his fellow-creature s let him begin the long, solitary task of perfecting himself.
Robertson Davies
#6. I just am a Canadian. It is not a thing which you can escape from. It is like having blue eyes
Robertson Davies
#7. Marriage is a framework to preserve friendship. It is valuable because it gives much more room to develop than just living together. It provides a base from which a person can work at understanding himself and another person.
Robertson Davies
#8. The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
Robertson Davies
#9. What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
Robertson Davies
#11. The critic is the duenna in the passionate affair between playwrights, actors and audiences - a figure dreaded, and occasionally comic, but never welcome, never loved.
Robertson Davies
#12. 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.
Robertson Davies
#13. Whether you are really right or not doesn't matter; it's the belief that counts.
Robertson Davies
#14. The Bible takes much of its color from whoever is reading it, and it provides a text to support almost every shade of opinion, however preposterous.
Robertson Davies
#15. You're all mad for words. Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books. Give me things!
Robertson Davies
#16. Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire.
Robertson Davies
#17. When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand. (Maria Magdalena Theotoky)
Robertson Davies
#18. My dear fellow, my whole life is moved by the principle that the one thing which is more important than peace is music. It is because I believe that I am poor.
Robertson Davies
#19. The egotist is all surface; underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn't consider important; in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.
Robertson Davies
#20. The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means.
Robertson Davies
#21. The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live.
Robertson Davies
#22. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.
Robertson Davies
#23. Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.
Robertson Davies
#24. 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.
Robertson Davies
#25. The recognition of oneself as a part of nature, and reliance on natural things, are disappearing for hundreds of millions of people who do not know that anything is being lost.
Robertson Davies
#26. You would not serve junk food at a banquet, and your book must be a banquet. Get your language from Swift , not from Shopsy's.
Robertson Davies
#27. 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.
Robertson Davies
#28. 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.
Robertson Davies
#29. In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.
Robertson Davies
#30. All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children ...
Robertson Davies
#32. Men have this climacteric, you know, like women. Doctors deny it, but I have met some very menopausal persons in their profession.
Robertson Davies
#33. 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.
Robertson Davies
#34. Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.
Robertson Davies
#35. I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.
Robertson Davies
#36. There is really no such thing as a secret; everybody likes to tell, and everybody does tell.
Robertson Davies
#37. 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?
Robertson Davies
#38. Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
Robertson Davies
#39. I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.
Robertson Davies
#40. People who have failed at Christianity aren't likely to make great Buddhists.
Robertson Davies
#41. In a government like ours, the Crown is the abiding and unshakable element in government; politicians may come and go, but the Crown remains and certain aspects of our system pertain to it which are not dependent on any political party. In this sense, the Crown is the consecrated spirit of Canada.
Robertson Davies
#42. There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
Robertson Davies
#43. Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.
Robertson Davies
#44. Money, it is often said, does not bring happiness; it must be added, however, that it makes it possible to support unhappiness with exemplary fortitude.
Robertson Davies
#45. The dog is a yes-animal. Very popular with people who can't afford a yes man.
Robertson Davies
#46. To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.
Robertson Davies
#47. A man who recognizes no God is probably placing an inordinate value on himself.
Robertson Davies
#48. Education for immediate effective consumption is more popular than ever, and nobody wants to think of the long term, or the intellectual tone of the nation.
Robertson Davies
#49. Let people alone. Let them find their way. Let them find their level and you may sometimes be delighted and astonished at the extraordinary high level to which they'll rise if they're let alone.
Robertson Davies
#50. It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing; they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.
Robertson Davies
#51. The result of a single action may spread like the circles that expand when a stone is thrown into a pond, until they touch places and people unguessed at by the person who threw the stone ...
Robertson Davies
#52. I don't suppose God laughs at the people who think He doesn't exist. He's above jokes. But the devil isn't. That's one of his most endearing qualities.
Robertson Davies
#53. I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.
Robertson Davies
#54. 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.
Robertson Davies
#55. To marry was to take a hand in a dangerous game where the stakes are the highest - a fuller life or a life diminished and confined. It was a game for adult players.
Robertson Davies
#56. Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.
Robertson Davies
#57. I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man's puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one.
Robertson Davies
#58. Ah, critics! How unforgiving they are toward anything that isn't, in some special way, known only to them, absolutely first-rate. Do they ever guess, I wonder, how much energy and guts and sheer talent it takes to be second-rate?
Robertson Davies
#59. God, youth is a terrible time! So much feeling and so little notion of how to handle it!
Robertson Davies
#60. If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language ... This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors ... who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.
Robertson Davies
#61. I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.
Robertson Davies
#62. 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.
Robertson Davies
#63. The average politician goes through a sentence like a man exploring a disused mine shaft-blind, groping, timorous and in imminent danger of cracking his shins on a subordinate clause or a nasty bit of subjunctive.
Robertson Davies
#64. We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways.
Robertson Davies
#65. 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
Robertson Davies
#66. Of course some of us had some geography in school and had studied maps, but a school map is a terribly uncommunicative thing.
Robertson Davies
#67. In India it is regarded as a good idea to dart in front of an oncoming car, for the car is sure to kill the evil spirits who are pursuing you, and all the rest of your life you will have good luck.
Robertson Davies
#69. The Alexander Technique keeps the body alive, at ages when many people have resigned themselves to irreversible decline.
Robertson Davies
#70. The house stank; a stench all its own pervaded every corner. It was a threnody in the key of Cat minor, with a ground-bass of Old Dog, and modulations of old people, waning lives, and relinquished hopes.
Robertson Davies
#71. But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory
humorous, poignant, humane allegory
disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.
Robertson Davies
#72. These matters require what I think of as the Shakespearean cast of thought. That is to say, a fine credulity about everything, kept in check by a lively skepticism about everything ... It keeps you constantly alert to every possibility.
Robertson Davies
#73. If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
Robertson Davies
#74. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.
Robertson Davies
#75. If you attack Stupidity you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life.
Robertson Davies
#76. His reply had that clarity, objectivity and reasonableness which is possible only to advisers who have completely missed the point.
Robertson Davies
#77. One can always tell it's summer when one sees school teachers hanging about the streets idly, looking like cannibals during a shortage of missionaries.
Robertson Davies
#78. Be sure you choose what you believe and know 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.
Robertson Davies
#79. Here are some homosexuals whom we would do well to take seriously.
Robertson Davies
#80. 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.
Robertson Davies
#81. It is odd how all men develop the notion, as they grow older, that their mothers were wonderful cooks. I have yet to meet a man who will admit that his mother was a kitchen assassin and nearly poisoned him.
Robertson Davies
#82. Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Robertson Davies
#83. Humour very often consists of shrewd perceptions about people. It's usually fun at someone's expense. Nowadays if you're funny at anybody's expense they run to the UN and say, "I must have an ombudsman to protect me." You hardly dare have a shrewd perception about anybody.
Robertson Davies
#84. May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.
Robertson Davies
#85. My position was a common one; I wanted to do the right thing but could not help regretting the damnable expense.
Robertson Davies
#87. They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit for them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses.
Robertson Davies
#88. A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies
#89. They were anxious to make men of us, by which they meant making us like themselves.
Robertson Davies
#90. Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.
Robertson Davies
#91. You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before.
Robertson Davies
#92. The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.
Robertson Davies
#93. 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.
Robertson Davies
#94. My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.
Robertson Davies
#96. No, it's the musicians and I must say they are an accomplished bunch, but odd, as musicians tend to be. Is it the vibration from their instruments, do you suppose, working on the brain? All that fraught buzzing?
Robertson Davies
#97. Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.
Robertson Davies
#98. On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.
Robertson Davies
#99. The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility, their disinclination to earn an honest dollar ...
Robertson Davies
#100. After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.
Robertson Davies
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