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

— Robertson Davies The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949)

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More quotes by Robertson Davies

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

Osbert Sitwell (1945)

Sometimes there was a serious article on a hot topic, and I especially remember one by a bishop headed "Is Nudity Salacious?"

A Rake at Reading (1980)

One might think, to hear some people talk, that this had been a particularly fine summer. From their point of view, I suppose, it has.

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 Dangerous Jewels (1960)

The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature. The reasons for such addiction are so many that I suspect they are never the same in any two cases.

The Pleasures of Love (1961)

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Robertson Davies (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.