Top 200 Robertson Davies Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Like it or not, to reach middle age with less money or less prestige than our father had is somewhat to lose face. Stupid of course, when put like that, but who is prepared to argue that we are not stupid in several important ways?”

— Robertson Davies

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

— Robertson Davies

103. “In the end, it is upon the quality and commitment of individuals that all group movements depend.”

— Robertson Davies

104. “In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth.”

— Robertson Davies

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

108. “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

109. “I cannot remember a time when I did not take it as understood that everybody has at least two, if not twenty-two sides to him.”

— Robertson Davies

110. “She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people.”

— Robertson Davies

111. “If a boy can’t have a good teacher, give him a psychological cripple or an exotic failure to deal with; don’t just give him a bad, dull teacher. This is where the private schools score over state-run schools; they can accommodate a few cultured madmen on the staff without having to offer explanations.”

— Robertson Davies

112. “Fiction is not photography, it’s oil painting.”

— Robertson Davies

113. “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

114. “But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.”

— Robertson Davies

115. “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

116. “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

117. “Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.”

— Robertson Davies

118. “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

119. “What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.”

— Robertson Davies

120. “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

121. “The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.”

— Robertson Davies

122. “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

123. “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

124. “I just am a Canadian. It is not a thing which you can escape from. It is like having blue eyes.”

— Robertson Davies

125. “The paradox of money is that when you have lots of it you can manage life quite cheaply. Nothing so economical as being rich.”

— Robertson Davies

126. “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

127. “Snobbery, like every other social attitude, takes its character from those who practise it. The snob is supposedly a mean creature, delighting in slight and trivial distinctions. But is the man who bathes every day a snob because he does not seek the company of the one-bath-a-week, one-shirt-a-week, one-pair-of-clean-drawers-a-week, one-pair-of-socks-a-week man?”

— Robertson Davies

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

— Robertson Davies

129. “I have been very miserable since – miserable not for an hour but for months on end – but I can still feel that hour’s misery in its perfect desolation, if I am fool enough to call it up in my mind.”

— Robertson Davies

130. “The Alexander Technique keeps the body alive, at ages when many people have resigned themselves to irreversible decline.”

— Robertson Davies

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

— Robertson Davies

132. “When I had to leave she kissed me on both cheeks – a thing she had never done before – and said, ‘There’s just one thing to remember; whatever happens, it does no good to be afraid.’ So I promised not to be afraid, and may even have been a fool enough to think I could keep my promise.”

— Robertson Davies

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “I cannot imagine any boy of spirit who would not be delighted to play a drunkard even to vomiting in front of his Sunday school. Indeed, the vomiting might be the chief attraction of the role.”

— Robertson Davies

138. “I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.”

— Robertson Davies

139. “He types his labored column – weary drudge! Senile fudge and solemn: spare, editor, to condemn these dry leaves of his autumn.”

— Robertson Davies

140. “For I was, as you have already guessed, a collaborator with Destiny, not one who put a pistol to its head and demanded particular treasures. The only thing for me to do was to keep on keeping on, to have faith in my whim, and remember that for me, as for the saints, illumination when it came would probably come from some unexpected source.”

— Robertson Davies

141. “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

142. “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

143. “The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.”

— Robertson Davies

144. “Women always think that if they tell a man not to be pompous that will shut him up, but I am an old hand at that game. I know that if a man bides his time his moment will come.”

— Robertson Davies

145. “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

146. “Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.”

— Robertson Davies

147. “Never harbor grudges; they sour your stomach and do no harm to anyone else.”

— Robertson Davies

148. “The ideal companion in bed is a good book.”

— Robertson Davies

149. “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

150. “Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.”

— Robertson Davies