Top 200 Robertson Davies Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

202. “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

203. “He became an unimaginative woman’s creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage.”

— Robertson Davies

204. “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

205. “Wake up! Be yourself, not a bad copy of something else!”

— Robertson Davies

206. “The gods destroy the heroes with a sudden blow, but they grind us mediocrities for weary, weary years.”

— Robertson Davies

207. “And I say to you that if you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.”

— Robertson Davies

208. “You are like a fire: you warm me.”

— Robertson Davies

209. “Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.”

— Robertson Davies

210. “To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.”

— Robertson Davies

211. “But I can endure a surprising amount of midnight torment without being absent from class sharp at nine the next day. I suppose that marks me as something not quite up to the Byronic standard.”

— Robertson Davies

212. “Of course I long for her, but in honesty I must say that I would rather long for her than have her continuously present. Travel agents assure us that ‘getting there is half the fun’; I might say with at least equal truth that longing is some of the best of loving.”

— Robertson Davies

213. “How they chirped over their cups.”

— Robertson Davies

214. “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

215. “People who have failed at Christianity aren’t likely to make great Buddhists.”

— Robertson Davies

216. “The gift that isn’t big enough to make a mark, but is too big to leave the possessor in peace. And so they can’t be content to be Sunday painters, or poets who write for a few friends, or composers whose handful of delicate little settings of Emily Dickinson can’t find a singer. It’s a special sort of hell.”

— Robertson Davies

217. “His reply had that clarity, objectivity and reasonableness which is possible only to advisers who have completely missed the point.”

— Robertson Davies

218. “Be not another if thou canst be thyself.”

— Robertson Davies

219. “Words are just farts from a lot of fools who have swallowed too many books.”

— Robertson Davies

220. “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

221. “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

222. “Myself: But wasn’t the decision a right one? Am I not here? What more could Feeling have achieved than was brought about by Reason?”

— Robertson Davies

223. “Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million.”

— Robertson Davies

224. “Anna, who has always been devout, knows well that Despair is a mortal sin, and now she knows that it is a luxury, as well.”

— Robertson Davies

225. “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

226. “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

227. “To this day I am indulgent toward orchestras that are trying to lift themselves in the world, while critics are busy assuring them that they are not the Vienna Philharmonic and never will be.”

— Robertson Davies

228. “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

229. “What chance has a Saint Francis, if his Assisi is a multicultured, financial, unyieldingly secular northern city, whose lepers and other detrimentals are charges on the public purse?”

— Robertson Davies

230. “To know all is to despise all.”

— Robertson Davies

231. “I was a talking lover, which most women hate.”

— Robertson Davies

232. “Poor woman, I suppose she led a dog’s life, and it made her disagreeable, which she mistook for being strong.”

— Robertson Davies

233. “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

234. “I don’t think Emily was quite up to the demands of being everything to Chips. Love lays heavy burdens on the loved one, sometimes.”

— Robertson Davies

235. “He blew his nose resoundingly. “B natural,” said he, “my cold drops more than a full tone every hour. Obviously I am dying.”

— Robertson Davies

236. “What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us. I know that sounds horrible and cruel, considering what happens to a lot of people, and it can’t be the whole explanation. But it’s a considerable part of it.”

— Robertson Davies

237. “She’s too much like him in temperament. Married couples should complement each other, and not merely double their losses. There’s much to be said for the square peg in the round hole, as the Cubist told the Vorticist.”

— Robertson Davies

238. “New Money wore dinner suits, which it called tuxedos, and smoked big cigars from which it removed the band before lighting up – an unthinkable solecism, for.”

— Robertson Davies

239. “Success? It has the shortest half-life of any known substance.”

— Robertson Davies

240. “But even Wagner, with his magnificent music and his rather less worthy pseudo-medieval words, is never wholly successful. Why? Because a work of art must be in some measure coherent; but thought and feeling mingled, as all of us experience them, are surging and incoherent. Thought and feeling trimmed into coherence in a work of art are still far from reality, still far from the agonizing confusion that rises like miasma in what a great poet has called the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”

— Robertson Davies

241. “Nobody told me he was an American.” “Not American – Canadian.” “Well, what’s the difference?” “They’re touchier, that’s what.”

— Robertson Davies

242. “You and I have precisely the same amount of time as the Old Masters – twenty-four hours in every day. There is no more, and never any less.”

— Robertson Davies

243. “If Heloise had been more clear-headed she’d have seen that Abelard was a frightful nerd in human relationships.”

— Robertson Davies

244. “She had an ability, invaluable in a weak person, to persuade herself that whatever was inevitable had her full approval, and was in some measure her own doing.”

— Robertson Davies

245. “Hector was sent to his office to wait, while Rat-face was restored to such limited consciousness as his heredity and his fate permitted him to enjoy.”

— Robertson Davies

246. “Who ever talks about a lifelong, intimate friendship expressing itself in the broadest possible range of conversation? If people are really alive and alert it ought to go on and on, prolonging life because there is always something more to be said.”

— Robertson Davies

247. “However much science and educational theory and advanced thinking you pump into a college or a university, it always retains a strong hint of its medieval origins.”

— Robertson Davies

248. “I know well enough how people in love drag the name of the loved one into every conversation, simply to utter that magical word, to savor it on the tongue.”

— Robertson Davies