Davies Robertson Quotes
Collection of top 100 famous quotes about Davies Robertson
Davies Robertson Quotes & Sayings
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In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth.
— Robertson Davies
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
But I was a lonely creature, and although I would have been very happy to have a friend I just never happened to meet one.
— Robertson Davies
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
I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.
— Robertson Davies
The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.
— Robertson Davies
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
There's the satisfaction of Eng-Lang-and-Lit; somebody else has said everything for you, and said it better.
— Robertson Davies
It is lost, lovely child, somewhere in the ragbag that I laughingly refer to as my memory.
— Robertson Davies
Curiosity is part of the cement that holds society together.
— Robertson Davies
You are like a fire: you warm me.
— Robertson Davies
There is really no such thing as a secret; everybody likes to tell, and everybody does tell.
— Robertson Davies
What had Pledger-Brown said? Too bad, Davey; he wanted blood and all we could offer was guts.
— Robertson Davies
What is meant to be heard is necessarily more direct in expression, and perhaps more boldly coloured, than what is meant for the reader.
— Robertson Davies
Nothing is more dangerous to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.
— Robertson Davies
Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision.
— Robertson Davies
There is more to marriage than four bare legs under a blanket.
— Robertson Davies
If you attack Stupidity you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life.
— Robertson Davies
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
— Robertson Davies
The book forces itself into my mind when I am lugging furniture, or pulling weeds.
— Robertson Davies
Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.
— Robertson Davies
We mistrust anything that too strongly challenges our ideal of mediocrity.
— Robertson Davies
The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
— Robertson Davies
How much more complicated life is than the attainment of a Ph.D. would lead one to believe!
— Robertson Davies
After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.
— Robertson Davies
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
Never neglect the charms of narrative for the human heart.
— Robertson Davies
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
Having me in the dining-room was almost the equivalent of having a Raeburn on the walls; I was classy, I was heavily varnished, and I offended nobody.
— Robertson Davies
Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.
— Robertson Davies
A Library goes on as far as thought can reach.
— Robertson Davies
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
A man must be obedient to the promptings of his innermost heart.
— Robertson Davies
No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
— Robertson Davies
The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.
— Robertson Davies
My position was a common one; I wanted to do the right thing but could not help regretting the damnable expense.
— Robertson Davies
To know all is to despise all.
— Robertson Davies
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
I think of an author as somebody who goes into the marketplace and puts down his rug and says, "I will tell you a story," and then he passes the hat.
— Robertson Davies
It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.
— Robertson Davies
A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.
— Robertson Davies
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
They were anxious to make men of us, by which they meant making us like themselves.
— Robertson Davies
Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.
— Robertson Davies
When a man is down on his luck he seems to consume all he can get of coffee and doughnuts.
— Robertson Davies
Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.
— Robertson Davies
All eras of history are an equal distance from eternity.
— Robertson Davies
I just am a Canadian. It is not a thing which you can escape from. It is like having blue eyes
— Robertson Davies
One learns one's mystery at the price of one's innocence.
— Robertson Davies
A Librettist is a mere drudge in the world of opera.
— Robertson Davies
Geordie wrote a letter to Mr. Webster in which the shrieking figure of Apology was hounded through a labyrinth of agonized syntax.
— Robertson Davies
There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.
— Robertson Davies
Wake up! Be yourself, not a bad copy of something else!
— Robertson Davies
Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.
— Robertson Davies
Only a fool expects to be happy all the time.
— Robertson Davies
Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.
— Robertson Davies
So Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty.
— Robertson Davies
What an amusing drama life is when one is not obliged to be one of the characters!
— Robertson Davies
Life itself is too great a miracle for us to make so much fuss about potty little reversals of what we pompously assume to be the natural order.
— Robertson Davies
All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable; it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.
— Robertson Davies
A world without corruption would be a strange world indeed - and a damned bad world for lawyers, let me say.
— Robertson Davies
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
Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.
— Robertson Davies
Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense; they're men of technique.
— Robertson Davies
We live in a world where bulk is equated with quality.
— Robertson Davies
It seemed to me as if the stones sang, in the strangest voices, in the language of Ultima Thule.
— Robertson Davies
Nobody who looks as though he enjoyed life is ever called distinguished, though he is a man in a million.
— Robertson Davies
In the end, it is upon the quality and commitment of individuals that all group movements depend.
— Robertson Davies
Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.
— Robertson Davies
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
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
Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
— Robertson Davies
You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing.
— Robertson Davies
My lifelong involvement with Mrs Dempster began at 5:58 o'clock p.m. on 27 December 1908, at which time I was ten years and seven months old.
— Robertson Davies
The art of the quoter is to know when to stop.
— Robertson Davies
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
— Robertson Davies
Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.
— Robertson Davies
Art is wine and experience is the brandy we distill from it.
— Robertson Davies
"There is no disputing about tastes," says the old saw. In my experience there is little else.
— Robertson Davies
Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.
— Robertson Davies
God, youth is a terrible time! So much feeling and so little notion of how to handle it!
— Robertson Davies
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
Subtle wits like to refresh themselves with a whiff of mild indecency.
— Robertson Davies
Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.
— Robertson Davies
No one needs a word processor if he has an efficient secretary.
— Robertson Davies
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
You can't persuade most of the public that education and making a living aren't the same thing.
— Robertson Davies
Some countries you love. Some countries you hate. Canada is a country you worry about.
— Robertson Davies
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
Be not another if thou canst be thyself.
— Robertson Davies
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
— Robertson Davies
To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.
— Robertson Davies