Robertson Davies > Quotes

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
― Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
― Robertson Davies

“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.”
― Robertson Davies

“Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.”
― Robertson Davies

“I wish people weren't so set on being themselves, when that means being a bastard.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”
― Robertson Davies, The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies

“Love affairs are for emotional sprinters; the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.”
― Robertson Davies

“Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.”
― Robertson Davies, World of Wonders

“But one must remember that they were all men with systems. Freud, monumentally hipped on sex (for which he personally had little use) and almost ignorant of Nature: Adler, reducing almost everything to the will to power: and Jung, certainly the most humane and gentlest of them, and possibly the greatest, but nevertheless the descendant of parsons and professors, and himself a super-parson and a super-professor. all men of extraordinary character, and they devised systems that are forever stamped with that character.… Davey, did you ever think that these three men who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically. And it should never be forgotten that they made the inward journey while they were working like galley-slaves at their daily tasks, considering other people's troubles, raising families, living full lives. They were heroes, in a sense that no space-explorer can be a hero, because they went into the unknown absolutely alone. Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids? Why don't you go home and shoulder your yoke, and be a hero too?”
― Robertson Davies, The Manticore

“To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.”
― Robertson Davies

“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

“Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence. ”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“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, Fifth Business

“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, Tempest-Tost

“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, The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks

“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, The Deptford Trilogy

“One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.”
― Robertson Davies

“We tend to think human knowledge as progressive; because we know more and more, our parents and grandparents are back numbers. But a contrary theory is possible - that we simply recognize different things at different times and in different ways.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“Fanaticism is overcompensation for doubt.”
― Robertson Davies

“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

“It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“Nothing grows old-fashioned so fast as modernity.”
― Robertson Davies, High Spirits

“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, Fifth Business

“I was afraid and did not know what I feared, which is the worst kind of fear.”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“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, The Merry Heart: Reflections on Reading Writing & the World of Books

“A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.”
― Robertson Davies

“Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.”
― Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels

“Who are you? Where do you fit into poetry and myth? Do you know who I think you are, Ramsay? I think you are Fifth Business. You don't know what that is? Well, in opera in a permanent company of the kind we keep up in Europe you must have a prima donna -- always a soprano, always the heroine, often a fool; and a tenor who always plays the lover to her; and then you must have a contralto, who is a rival to the soprano, or a sorceress or something; and a basso, who is the villain or the rival or whatever threatens the tenor.
"So far, so good. But you cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business, because he is the odd man out, the person who has no opposite of the other sex. And you must have Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of somebody's death if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without Fifth Business! It is not spectacular, but it is a good line of work, I can tell you, and those who play it sometimes have a career that outlasts the golden voices. Are you Fifth Business? You had better find out.”
― Robertson Davies, Fifth Business

“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, The Manticore

“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