Top 200 Robertson Davies Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The book forces itself into my mind when I am lugging furniture, or pulling weeds.”

— Robertson Davies

152. “Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling.”

— Robertson Davies

153. “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

154. “Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They’d have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.”

— Robertson Davies

155. “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

156. “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

157. “The art of the quoter is to know when to stop.”

— Robertson Davies

158. “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.”

— Robertson Davies

159. “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

160. “Female beauty in an important Minor Sacrament which cannot be received too often; I am no sure at all that the neglect of it does not constitute a sin of some kind.”

— Robertson Davies

161. “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

162. “I saw corpses, and grew used to their unimportant look, for a dead man without any of the panoply of death is a desperately insignificant object.”

— Robertson Davies

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

— Robertson Davies

164. “I do not ‘get’ ideas; ideas get me.”

— Robertson Davies

165. “In too many modern churches there is no emphasis on theology at all. There is a kind of justification by works or by keeping up with modern trends anything that will drag in a few more people.”

— Robertson Davies

166. “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

167. “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

168. “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

169. “We come to God in little steps, not a leap, and that love of police-court truth you think so much of comes very late on the way, if it comes at all. What is truth? as Pilate asked; I’ve never pretended that I could have told him. I’m just glad when a boozer sobers up, or a man stops beating his woman, or a crooked lad tries to go straight. If it makes him boast a bit, that’s not the worst harm it can do. You unbelieving people apply cruel, hard standards to us who believe.”

— Robertson Davies

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.”

— Robertson Davies

174. “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

175. “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

176. “A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed – and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say.”

— Robertson Davies

177. “I am constantly astonished by the people, otherwise intelligent, who think that anything so complex and delicate as a marriage can be left to take care of itself. One sees them fussing about all sorts of lesser concerns, apparently unaware that side by side with them – often in the same bed – a human creature is perishing from lack of affection, of emotional malnutrition.”

— Robertson Davies

178. “Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don’t know what they are conserving.”

— Robertson Davies

179. “Sexual thrills are not all physical, and although Parlabane was an unlikely seducer, even on the intellectual plane, it was clear that his desire was, by this prolonged tickling, to bring me to an orgasm of the mind.”

— Robertson Davies

180. “There’s the satisfaction of Eng-Lang-and-Lit; somebody else has said everything for you, and said it better.”

— Robertson Davies

181. “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

182. “You can’t persuade most of the public that education and making a living aren’t the same thing.”

— Robertson Davies

183. “You are still young enough to think that torment of the spirit is a splendid thing, a sign of a superior nature. But you are no longer a young man; you are a youngish middle aged man, and it is time you found out that these spiritual athletics do not lead to wisdom.”

— Robertson Davies

184. “I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.”

— Robertson Davies

185. “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

186. “Whether you are really right or not doesn’t matter; it’s the belief that counts.”

— Robertson Davies

187. “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

188. “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.”

— Robertson Davies

189. “Despite these afternoon misgivings and self-reproaches I clung to my notion, ill-defined though it was, that a serious study of human knowledge, or theory, or belief, if undertaken with a critical but not a cruel mind, would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man.”

— Robertson Davies

190. “The beauty of ethics is that nobody can be perfectly certain about what it includes or even what it means.”

— Robertson Davies

191. “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

192. “Unhappiness of the kind that is recognized and examined and brooded over is a spiritual luxury.”

— Robertson Davies

193. “We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.”

— Robertson Davies

194. “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

195. “Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn’t, he should be ashamed of himself.”

— Robertson Davies

196. “She was a romantic, and as I had never met a female romantic before it was a delight to me to explore her emotions. She wanted to know all about me, and I told her as honestly as I could; but as I was barely twenty, and a romantic myself, I know now that I lied in every word I uttered – lied not in fact but in emphasis, in colour, and in intention.”

— Robertson Davies

197. “It is woefully hard to find good, or even merely literate, writers, and they laugh at me when I say that sloppy, go-as-you-please writing carries less authority than decent prose. You must remember our public, they say. And indeed that is what I do, and I think the public is fully able to deal with the best they can produce. Patronizing the public, and assuming that it hangs, breathless, upon what it reads in the papers, is almost the worst of journalistic sins.”

— Robertson Davies

198. “Sometimes fear could be forgotten, but never for long.”

— Robertson Davies

199. “Wit and high spirits and a sense of fun- yes, they’re wonderful things. But a sense of humour- a real one- is a rarity and can be utter hell. Because it’s immoral, you know, in the real sense of the word: I mean, it makes its own laws; and it possesses the person who has it like a demon. Fools talk about it as though it were the same thing as a sense of balance, but believe me, it’s not. It’s a sense of anarchy, and a sense of chaos. Thank God it’s rare.”

— Robertson Davies

200. “If you are determined on the religious life, you have to toughen up your mind. You have to let it be a thouroughfare for all thoughts, and among them you must make choices.”

— Robertson Davies