Skip to content

Robertson Davies Quotes

1913–1995 Canada

Robertson Davies CC (August 28 1913 – December 2 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist and professor.

Canada
Academics
Editors
Journalists
Novelists

Random Robertson Davies quote

188 quotes

Whoever declares a child to be "delicate" thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.

The Cunning Man (1994)

The word "religion" just means "law," the consideration of law and consequence. That's what interests me: what happens as a result of what people do.

Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

A Library goes on as far as thought can reach.

The Cunning Man (1994)

Modern man is a debtor, or he is nothing, and money becomes more and more illusory.

The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949)

You would not serve junk food at a banquet, and your book must be a banquet. Get your language from Swift, not from Shopsy's.

Bookes give no wisdom where none was before,
But where some is, there reading makes it more.

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

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

I have never consciously "used" humour in my life. Such humour as I may have is one of the elements in which I live.

One-Half of Robertson Davies (1977)

I think possibly the final sophistication is the recovery of innocence. Where you really get where you take things rather simply.

Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

The problem for a Paracelsian physician like me is that I see diseases as disguises in which people present me with their wretchedness.

The Cunning Man (1994)

Anybody who has had experience of poetesses knows that they may forgive a punch on the jaw, but never a suggestion that they would be wiser to give up versifying.

A Curmudgeon (1961)

It used to be fashionable for authors to have their pictures taken with dogs, but the dogs always looked like models hired from an advertising agency, and probably were.

mehitabel (1959)

Happiness is a very deep and dispersed state. It's not a kind of excitement.

Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

A sense of wonder is in itself a religious feeling. But in so many people the sense of wonder gets lost. It gets scarred over.

Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

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.

How to Be a Collector (1995)

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealised past.

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Perhaps God made cats so that man might have the pleasure of fondling the tiger...

Prayer is petition, intercession, adoration, and contemplation; great saints and mystics have agreed on this definition. To stop short at petition is to pray only in a crippled fashion.

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

I cannot imagine any boy of spirit who would not be delighted to play a drunkard — even to vomiting — in front of his Sunday school. Indeed, the vomiting might be the chief attraction of the role.

Forgotten Dialogues (1961)

Emotional chaos is not pleasant; distillation of that chaos afterward may perhaps be pleasant in some of its aspects, and undoubtedly gives pleasure to others.

A Voice from the Attic (1960)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Robertson Davies (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.