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Top Robertson Davies Quotes

Browse top 117 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Robertson Davies.

Favorite Robertson Davies Quotes

1. "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
2. "An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows. All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages." ~ Robertson Davies
3. "Elsie, who had a lot of energy and no shame...she seduced me. It was not a success, from Elsie's point of view, because the orgasm for women was just coming into general popularity then, and she didn't have one." ~ Robertson Davies
4. "Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures." ~ Robertson Davies
5. "I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them." ~ Robertson Davies
6. "The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task." ~ Robertson Davies
7. "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
8. "...so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty." ~ Robertson Davies
9. "I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear." ~ Robertson Davies
10. "Need we go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although I remember her as speaking golden words, I cannot recall precisely anything she said. If love is to be watched and listened to without embarrassment, it must be transmuted into art, and I don't know how to do that, and it is not what I have come to Zurich to learn." ~ Robertson Davies
11. "He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father." ~ Robertson Davies
12. "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
13. "Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it." ~ Robertson Davies
14. "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
15. "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
16. "A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life." ~ Robertson Davies
17. "The love of truth lies at the root of much humor." ~ Robertson Davies
18. "If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual." ~ Robertson Davies
19. "Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision." ~ Robertson Davies
20. "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
21. "The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty.(...) Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone." ~ Robertson Davies
22. "Be sure you choose what you believe and know 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
23. "If you cling frantically to the good, how are you to find out what the good really is?" ~ Robertson Davies
24. "Are you New World or Old?''Sounds like a novel by Henry James.''Never read him.''Don't. But that was his question and he plumped for the Old." ~ Robertson Davies
25. "I seemed to be the only person I knew without a plan that would put the world on its feet and wipe the tear from every eye." ~ Robertson Davies
26. "Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn't need them for her destiny... It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive some dull husband and live on his money till she is eighty, going to lectures and comparing the attractions of winter tours that offer the romance of the Caribbean." ~ Robertson Davies
27. "When I hear girls I know longing to be what they call liberated, and when I hear others rejoicing in what they think of as liberation, I feel a fool, because I simply do not know where I stand. (Maria Magdalena Theotoky)" ~ Robertson Davies
28. "They were anxious to make men of us, by which they meant making us like themselves." ~ Robertson Davies
29. "You are certainly unique. Everyone is unique. Nobody has ever suffered quite like you before because nobody has ever been you before." ~ Robertson Davies
30. "A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed - and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say." ~ Robertson Davies
31. "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
32. "Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?" ~ Robertson Davies
33. "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
34. "Padre Blazon was almost shouting by this time, and I had to hush him. People in the restaurant were staring, and one or two of the ladies of devout appearance were heaving their bosoms indignantly. He swept the room with the wild eyes of a conspirator in a melodrama and dropped his voice to a hiss. Fragments of food, ejected from his mouth by this jet, flew about the table. [p.201]" ~ Robertson Davies
35. "Marriage isn't just domesticity, or the continuance of the race, or institutionalized sex, or a form of property right. And it damned well isn't happiness, as that word is generally used. I think it's a way of finding your soul." ~ Robertson Davies
36. "But when mother died, Caroline was twelve, and in that queer time between childhood and nubile girlhood, when some girls seem to be wise without experience, and perhaps more clear-headed then they will be again until after their menopause." ~ Robertson Davies
37. "To know all is to despise all." ~ Robertson Davies
38. "It is part of the received doctrine of modern biography that all characters are Flawed, and as a Christian priest I am quite ready to agree, but the Flaws the biographers exhibited usually meant that the person under discussion had not seen eye to eye with the biographer on matters of politics, or social betterment, or something impersonal." ~ Robertson Davies
39. "Wisdom may be rented...on the experience of other people, but we buy it at an inordinate price before we make it our own forever." ~ Robertson Davies
40. "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 life of your betters." ~ Robertson Davies
41. "Any theologian understands martyrdom, but only the martyr experiences the fire." ~ Robertson Davies
42. "She herself was a victim of that lust for books which rages in the breast like a demon, and which cannot be stilled save by the frequent and plentiful acquisition of books. This passion is more common, and more powerful, than most people suppose. Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command." ~ Robertson Davies
43. "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
44. "Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence." ~ Robertson Davies
45. "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
46. "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
47. "We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless." ~ Robertson Davies
48. "Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity." ~ Robertson Davies
49. "To instruct calls for energy, and to remain almost silent, but watchful and helpful, while students instruct themselves, calls for even greater energy. To see someone fall (which will teach him not to fall again) when a word from you would keep him on his feet but ignorant of an important danger, is one of the tasks of the teacher that calls for special energy, because holding in is more demanding than crying out." ~ Robertson Davies
50. "You played it with great seriousness. And it is not such an uncommon game. Do you know Ibsen's poem -- To live it to do battle with trolls in the vaults of the heart and brain. To write: that is to sit in judgement over one's self."" ~ Robertson Davies
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If you wait to live you will never succeed. Living begins today and it begins within you."
Author: Asa Don Brown

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Tan
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