Robertson Davies famous quotes

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

#Courage #Adversity #People

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

#Heart #Thinking #Men

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

#Mother #Men #Kitchen

The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
-- Robertson Davies

#Lying #Roots #Sense Of Humor

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
-- Robertson Davies

#Educational #Optimistic #Knowledge

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

#Silence #Tongue #Sometimes

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

#Morning #Book #Reading

Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
-- Robertson Davies

#Love #Wise #Cat

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
-- Robertson Davies

#Men #Luck #Things Happen

Never harbor grudges; they sour your stomach and do no harm to anyone else.
-- Robertson Davies

#Inspirational #Grudge #Harm

There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.
-- Robertson Davies

#Book #Writing #Mad

To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
-- Robertson Davies

#Writing #Asking #Serious

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.
-- Robertson Davies

#Future #Past #People

Moderation, the Golden Mean, the Aristonmetron, is the secret of wisdom and of happiness. But it does not mean embracing an unadventurous mediocrity; rather it is an elaborate balancing act, a feat of intellectual skill demanding constant vigilance. Its aim is a reconciliation of opposites.
-- Robertson Davies

#Mean #Acceptance #Opposites

The dog is a yes-animal. Very popular with people who can't afford a yes man.
-- Robertson Davies

#Funny #Dog #Silly

Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
-- Robertson Davies

#Emotional #Affair #Love Affair

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
-- Robertson Davies

#Life #Happiness #Happy

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
-- Robertson Davies

#Childhood #Belief #Spoiled

The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.
-- Robertson Davies

#Spiritual #Book #Reading

One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.
-- Robertson Davies

#Innocence #Mystery

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

#Stupidity #Weapons #Doctrine

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.
-- Robertson Davies

#Funny #Wise #Dog

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

#Book #Reading #People

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

#Wise #Men #Two

The young are often accused of exaggerating their troubles; they do so, very often, in the hope of making some impression upon the inertia and the immovability of the selfish old.
-- Robertson Davies

#Selfish #Trouble #Young

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

#Men #Long #Want

I do not really like vacations. I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded; I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time.
-- Robertson Davies

#Vacation #Days Off #Week

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

#Childhood #Slavery #May

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

#Christian #Reading #Color

The people who fear humor - and they are many - are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.
-- Robertson Davies

#Humor #Light #People

Civilization rests on two things: the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and the voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendid civilization be without both?
-- Robertson Davies

#Discovery #Civilization #Two

Not enough attention is paid to the negative side of fashion. Great effort is exerted to make people look smart, but somebody should face the fact that a lot of people never will be smart, and that they should be given some assistance in maintaining their fascinating dowdiness.
-- Robertson Davies

#Fashion #Smart #People

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

#Thinking #Laughing #People

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

#Depression #Writing #Suggestions

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
-- Robertson Davies

#Writing #Tasks #Difficult

The book forces itself into my mind when I am lugging furniture, or pulling weeds.
-- Robertson Davies

#Weed #Book #Mind

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

#Men #Average #Nasty

The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.
-- Robertson Davies

#Students #Graduates #Champagne

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.
-- Robertson Davies

#Blessed #Tragedy #Half

Women say . . . that if men had to have babies there would soon be no babies in the world. . . . I have sometimes wished that some clever man would actually have a baby in some new labor-saving way; then all men could take it up, and one of the oldest taunts in the world would be stilled forever.
-- Robertson Davies

#Baby #Clever #Men

They're all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.
-- Robertson Davies

#Wise #Knowledge #Missing

Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.
-- Robertson Davies

#Love #Years #Sick

If you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
-- Robertson Davies

#Worry #Treasure #Belief

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

#Art #Wine #Alcohol

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me
-- Robertson Davies

#Ideas

'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.
-- Robertson Davies

#Daughter #Running #Children

The best among our writers are doing their accustomed work of mirroring what is deep in the spirit of our time; if chaos appears in those mirrors, we must have faith that in the future, as always in the past, that chaos will slowly reveal itself as a new aspect of order.
-- Robertson Davies

#Past #Order #Mirrors

That was what stuck in the craws of all the good women of Deptford: Mrs Dempster had not been raped, as a decent woman would have been-no, she had yielded because a man wanted her. The subject was not one that could be freely discussed even among intimates, but it was understood without saying that if women began to yield for such reasons as that, marriage and society would not last long. Any man who spoke up for Mrs Dempster probably believed in Free Love. Certainly he associated sex with pleasure, and that put him in a class with filthy thinkers like Cece Athelstan.
-- Robertson Davies

#Love #Sex #Men

He was a genius - that is to say, a man who does superlatively and without obvious effort something that most people cannot do by the uttermost exertion of their abilities.
-- Robertson Davies

#Men #People #Effort

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

#World #Opera

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.
-- Robertson Davies

#Fear #Views #Soul

Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million.
-- Robertson Davies

#Men #Looks #Life Is

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular.
-- Robertson Davies

#Matter #May #Temperament

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.
-- Robertson Davies

#People #Dollars #Majority

The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature. The reasons for such addiction are so many that I suspect they are never the same in any two cases. It includes passion but does not survive by passion; it has its whiffs of the agreeable vertigo of young love, but it is stable more often than dizzy; it is a growing, changing thing, and it is tactful enough to give the addicted parties occasional rests from strong and exhausting feeling of any kind.
-- Robertson Davies

#Strong #Party #Passion

The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.
-- Robertson Davies

#People #Disease #Physicians

The ideal companion in bed is a good book.
-- Robertson Davies

#Book #Bed #Good Book

The Victorians have been immoderately praised, and immoderately blamed, and surely it is time we formed some reasonable picture of them? There was their courageous, intellectually adventurous side, their greedy and inhuman side, their superbly poetic side, their morally pretentious side, their tea and buttered toast side, and their champagne and Skittles side. Much like ourselves, in fact, though rather dirtier.
-- Robertson Davies

#Tea #Facts #Sides

Many authors write like amateur blacksmiths making their first horseshoe; the clank of the anvil, the stench of the scorched leather apron, the sparks and the cursing are palpable, and this appeals to those who rank "sincerity" very high. Nabokov is more like a master swordsmith making a fine blade; nothing is amiss, nothing is too much, there is no fuss, and the finished product must be handled with great care, or it will cut you badly.
-- Robertson Davies

#Writing #Cutting #Care

It used to be fashionable for authors to have their pictures taken with dogs, but the dogs always looked like models hired from an advertising agency, and probably were.
-- Robertson Davies

#Dog #Taken #Agency

The reclusive man who marries the gregarious woman, the timid woman who marries the courageous man, the idealist who marries the realist we can all see these unions: the marriages in which tenderness meets loyalty, where generosity sweetens moroseness, where a sense of beauty eases some aridity of the spirit, are not so easy for outsiders to recognize; the parties themselves may not be fully aware of such elements in a good match.
-- Robertson Davies

#Loyalty #Party #Men

Sometimes there was a serious article on a hot topic, and I especially remember one by a bishop headed "Is Nudity Salacious?" The bishop thought it need not be, if encountered in the proper spirit, but he gave a lot of enlightening examples of conditions under which it might be, in his word, "inflammatory." There wasn't much nudity in our neck of the woods, and I enjoyed that article tremendously.
-- Robertson Davies

#Example #Hot #Needs

It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.
-- Robertson Davies

#Children #Memories #Lost Love

Speakers' nerves affect them in various ways. Some tremble, some become frenzied. I lose all confidence, and suffer from a leaden oppression that makes me wonder why I ever agreed to speak at all; the Tomb and the Conqueror Worm seem preferable to delivering the stupid and piffling speech I have so carefully prepared.
-- Robertson Davies

#Stupid #Suffering #Nerves

Several children present me with scraps of paper for autographs: obviously don't know who I am and don't care. I sign "Jackie Collins" and they go away quite content.
-- Robertson Davies

#Children #Who I Am #Going Away

I don't think I would ever write a book with what anybody could call ***** in it, because I feel that ***** is a cheat. It is an attempt to provide sexual experience by secondhand means. Now sex is a thing which has to be experienced firsthand, if you are really going to understand it, and ***** is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars. It's not the same thing. Sex is primarily a question of relationships. Pornography is a do-it-yourself kit--a twenty-second best.
-- Robertson Davies

#Sex #Book #Writing

The nature of happiness is such that happiness retreats the more intensely you pursue it.
-- Robertson Davies

#Motivational #Happiness #Retreat

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.
-- Robertson Davies

#Art #Long #Religion

Curiosity is part of the cement that holds society together.
-- Robertson Davies

#Curiosity #Together #Cement

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.
-- Robertson Davies

#Memories #Book #Looks

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

#Science #Understanding #May

Secrets are the blood of life. Every big thing is a secret, even when you know it, because you never know all of it. If you can know everything about anything, it is not worth knowing.
-- Robertson Davies

#Blood #Knowing #Secret

I have no skills with machines. I fear them, and because I cannot help attributing human qualities to them, I suspect that they hate me and will kill me if they can.
-- Robertson Davies

#Hate #Technology #Skills

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

#Dark #America #People

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

#Giving #Curiosity #May

It is not always easy to diagnose. The simplest form of stupidity - the mumbling, nose-picking, stolid incomprehension - can be detected by anyone. But the stupidity which disguises itself as thought, and which talks so glibly and eloquently, indeed never stops talking, in every walk of life is not so easy to identify, because it marches under a formidable name, which few dare attack. It is called Popular Opinion...
-- Robertson Davies

#Talking #Names #Stupidity

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

#Book #Ignorance #Stuff

Very often when I am introduced to women, I think, What is she really like behind the disguise which she wears? And very often I discover that she is pleasant enough, and probably would expand and glow if she received enough affection.
-- Robertson Davies

#Women #Thinking #Affection

No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
-- Robertson Davies

#People #World #Feels

Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.
-- Robertson Davies

#Fool #Foolishness

The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.
-- Robertson Davies

#Quality #Way #Influence

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.
-- Robertson Davies

#Horse #Imagination #Flying

Inactivity and deprivation of all accustomed stimulus is not rest; it is a preparation for the tomb
-- Robertson Davies

#Preparation #Stimulus #Deprivation

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.
-- Robertson Davies

#Class #People #Mind

The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books
-- Robertson Davies

#Book #Pleasure #Pastime

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear. . .
-- Robertson Davies

#Book #People #Secret

There are times when I think that the reading I have done in the past has had no effect except to cloud my mind and make me indecisive
-- Robertson Davies

#Reading #Thinking #Past

This is the Great Theatre of Life. Admission is free, but the taxation is mortal. You come when you can, and leave when you must. The show is continuous. Goodnight.
-- Robertson Davies

#Theatre #Taxation #Admission

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

#Self #Doubt #Important

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

#Support #Doe #Fortitude

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

#Book #Mad #Giving

Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat machine, equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of brilliant fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt. Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.
-- Robertson Davies

#Knowledge #Order #Healthy

The women we really love are the women who complete us, who have the qualities we can borrow and so become something nearer to whole men. Just as we complete them, of course; it’s not a one-way thing. Leola and I, when romance was stripped away, were too much alike; our strengths and weaknesses were too nearly the same. Together we would have doubled our gains and our losses, but that isn’t what love is.
-- Robertson Davies

#Loss #Love Is #Men

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

#Children #Real #Serious

I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.
-- Robertson Davies

#Fear #Kind #Worst

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

#Mother #Children #Parenting

When a man is down on his luck he seems to consume all he can get of coffee and doughnuts.
-- Robertson Davies

#Coffee #Men #Luck

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.
-- Robertson Davies

#Money #People #Mind

He types his labored column - weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.
-- Robertson Davies

#Autumn #Editors #Fudge

It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.
-- Robertson Davies

#Art #Children #War