Top 200 Robertson Davies Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Robertson Davies

Featured in: Courage Quotes, Quotes About Strength, Deep Quotes About Life, Quotes About People, Adversity Quotes

2. “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

— Robertson Davies

3. “A Library goes on as far as thought can reach.”

— Robertson Davies

4. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

5. “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

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

— Robertson Davies

7. “You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.”

— Robertson Davies

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Some countries you love. Some countries you hate. Canada is a country you worry about.”

— Robertson Davies

13. “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

14. “Oh hearts! Nobody gets through life without a broken heart. The important thing is to break the heart so that when it mends it will be stronger than before.”

— Robertson Davies

15. “It seemed to me as if the stones sang, in the strangest voices, in the language of Ultima Thule.”

— Robertson Davies

16. “The love that dare not speak its name has become the love that won’t shut up.”

— Robertson Davies

17. “If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.”

— Robertson Davies

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

— Robertson Davies

19. “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

20. “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.”

— Robertson Davies

21. “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

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

— Robertson Davies

23. “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.”

— Robertson Davies

24. “The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.”

— Robertson Davies

25. “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

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

— Robertson Davies

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “I think we’re living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn’t need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.”

— Robertson Davies

31. “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

32. “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

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

— Robertson Davies

34. “The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.”

— Robertson Davies

35. “Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground – not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.”

— Robertson Davies

36. “Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.”

— Robertson Davies

37. “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.”

— Robertson Davies

38. “Inactivity and deprivation of all accustomed stimulus is not rest; it is a preparation for the tomb.”

— Robertson Davies

39. “So – I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me – if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time.”

— Robertson Davies

40. “I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, “I will tell you a story,” and then he passes the hat.”

— Robertson Davies

41. “If you don’t hurry up and let life know what you want, life will damned soon show you what you’ll get.”

— Robertson Davies

42. “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

43. “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

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

— Robertson Davies

45. “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

46. “One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.”

— Robertson Davies

47. “Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.”

— Robertson Davies

48. “No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.”

— Robertson Davies

49. “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

50. “It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.”

— Robertson Davies