Robertson Davies Quotes

He became an unimaginative woman's creation. Delilah had shorn his locks and assured him he looked much neater and cooler without them. He gave her his soul, and she transformed it into a cabbage.

You'll go far. How do I know? Because life is goosing you so hard you'll never stop climbing.

When the time came for Pompadour herself to die, she confessed, was given her viaticum, and was from that time forth forbidden to see her lover. And when her body was borne away from Versailles, Louis was thought to have behaved rather badly because he watched the sad procession from a balcony. Let no one suppose that these people lived lives that were any more free from religious and neighbourly censure than the adulterers in our smallest Canadian villages. Even wealth and privilege could not wholly insulate them from that frost.

Conversation in its true meaning isn't all wagging the tongue; sometimes it is a deeply shared silence.

Our age has robbed millions of the simplicity of ignorance, and has so far failed to lift them to the simplicity of wisdom.

It is not hard to be popular with any group, whether composed of the most conventional Canadians or of Central European freaks, if one is prepared to talk to people about themselves.

Need we go into details about what I said to Judy? I am no poet, and I suppose what I said was very much what everybody always says, and although I remember her as speaking golden words, I cannot recall precisely anything she said. If love is to be watched and listened to without embarrassment, it must be transmuted into art, and I don't know how to do that, and it is not what I have come to Zurich to learn.

Surely we all know scores of professional men and women who, apart from their professional concerns, seem not to have enough brains to butter a biscuit. They probably had intelligence once. But when their university had given them its blessing, they thought that enough had been done for one lifetime.

Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.

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.

Fanaticism is ... compensation for doubt

If I tarted up in a nice suit and a clean collar, I could spend hours and hours every week jawing to Rotary Clubs about what fine music is and how I am just as good as they are. I'm not as good as they are, praise be God! I am a honest citizen, I am not fit to black their boots.

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. Also the reluctance people have to learn that certain actions will bring certain consequences … people don't learn. Over and over again they do the same stupid things without having learned what happens. … We are not wise because we are always looking for causes for things which are outside ourselves.

"He blew his nose resoundingly. "B natural," said he, "my cold drops more than a full tone every hour. Obviously I am dying.

It seemed to me as if the stones sang, in the strangest voices, in the language of Ultima Thule.