Robertson Davies Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• 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

  Mean, Acceptance, Skills

  Robertson Davies, Surridge, Jennifer (1997). “Happy Alchemy: Writings on the Theatre and Other Lively Arts”, M&S

  19 Copy quote

• Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.

  Robertson Davies

  Faith, Doubt, Atheism

  14 Copy quote

• The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature.

  Robertson Davies

  Pleasure, Creatures, Living Creatures

  "The Pleasures of Love". 1961.

  9 Copy quote

• The people who fear humor - and they are many - are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.

  Robertson Davies

  Humor, Light, People

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Intelligent, Emotional, Thinking

  "The Pleasures of Love". 1961.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Spiders, Asking

  Robertson Davies (1997). “The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books”, Viking Press

  19 Copy quote

• The book forces itself into my mind when I am lugging furniture, or pulling weeds.

  Robertson Davies

  Weed, Book, Mind

  Robertson Davies (2002). “For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies”, Penguin Group USA

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Long, Tasks

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, House, Kind

  Robertson Davies, J. Madison Davis (1989). “Conversations with Robertson Davies”, p.231, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  7 Copy quote

• Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.

  Robertson Davies

  Love, Funny, Wise

  21 Copy quote

• I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind... At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.

  Robertson Davies

  Wise, Blue, Hands

  "The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks". Book by Robertson Davies, 1947.

  15 Copy quote

• 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

  Spiritual, Reading, Book

  Robertson Davies (2008). “Selected works on the art of writing”, Penguin Group Canada

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Jobs, Doors, Giving

  5 Copy quote

• When one is traveling, one must expect to spend a certain amount of money foolishly.

  Robertson Davies

  Certain, Amount

  Robertson Davies (1986). “The papers of Samuel Marchbanks”, Viking, 1986

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving, World, Splendor

  Robertson Davies (1976). “World of wonders”, Penguin Books, 1977

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Pleasure, Live By

  Robertson Davies (2008). “Selected Works on the Pleasures of Reading”, Penguin Group Canada

  5 Copy quote

• A Library goes on as far as thought can reach.

  Robertson Davies

  Library, Goes On

  Robertson Davies (1996). “The Cunning Man”, Penguin Group USA

  5 Copy quote

• This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.

  Robertson Davies

  Stars, Character, Thinking

  Robertson Davies (1996). “Fifth business”, Penguin, 1996

  5 Copy quote

• 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. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines - not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.

  Robertson Davies

  Lying, Book, Reality

  "Tempest-Tost". Book by Robertson Davies, Part 6, 1951.

  7 Copy quote

• The young are often accused of exaggerating their troubles; they do so, very often, in the hope of making some impression upon the inertia and the immovability of the selfish old.

  Robertson Davies

  Selfish, Trouble, Young

  Robertson Davies (1952). “Tempest-tost”, Clarke Irwin

  11 Copy quote

• When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle.

  Robertson Davies

  Powerful, Men, Drunk

  Robertson Davies (1996). “The Cunning Man”, Penguin Group USA

  14 Copy quote

• The whole world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young, and everlastingly harp on the fact they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution which would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curses of the world.

  Robertson Davies

  Men, Thinking, Grandfather

  "The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks".

  16 Copy quote

• I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.

  Robertson Davies

  Fear, Kind, Worst

  Robertson Davies (1996). “Fifth business”, Penguin, 1996

  5 Copy quote

• The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.

  Robertson Davies

  Art, Book, Reading

  8 Copy quote

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

  Robertson Davies

  People, Age, Technique

  11 Copy quote

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