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Robertson Davies Quotes | Quotes said by Robertson Davies

  • Robertson Davies Quote #1

    ... 'But Gold was not all. The other kings bring Frank Innocence and Mirth.' | Darcourt was startled, then delighted. 'That is very fine, Yerko; is it your own?' | 'No, it is in the story. I saw it in New York. The kings say, We bring you Gold, Frank Innocence, and Mirth.' | 'Sancta simplicitas,' said Darcourt, raising his eyes to mine. 'If only there were more Mirth in the message He has left to us. We miss it sadly, in the world we have made. And Frank Innocence. Oh, Yerko, you dear man.' ...


  • Robertson Davies Quote #2

    ...so Leola thought that a modest romance with a hero in embryo could do no harm - might even be a patriotic duty.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #3

    A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #4

    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 Quote #5

    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 Quote #6

    An infant is a seed. Is it an oak seed or a cabbage seed? Who knows. All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #7

    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 Quote #8

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

  • Robertson Davies Quote #9

    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.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #10

    But in every church there are people who, for reasons which seem sufficient to them, do not approve of their pastor and seek to harry him and bully him into some condition pleasing to themselves. The democracy which the Reformation brought into the Christian Church rages in their bosoms like a fire; they would deny that they regard their clergyman as their spiritual hired hand, whom they boss and oversee for his own good, but that is certainly the impression they give to observers.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    But the character of the music emphasized the tale as allegory--humorous, poignant, humane allegory--disclosing the metamorphosis of life itself, in which man moves from confident inexperience through the bitterness of experience, toward the rueful wisdom of self-knowledge.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #13

    But what I knew then was that nobody-- not even my mother-- was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself on the surface.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #14

    But what I knew then was that nobody-not even my mother-was to be trusted in a strange world that showed very little of itself in the surface.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #15

    Civilization rests on two things, said Hitzig; the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?

  • Robertson Davies Quote #16

    Commanders and historians are the people who discuss wars; I was in the infantry, and most of the time I did not know where I was or what I was doing except that I was obeying orders and trying not to be killed in any of the variety of horrible ways open to me.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #17

    Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #18

    Education for immediate effective consumption is more popular than ever, and nobody wants to think of the long term, or the intellectual tone of the nation.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #19

    Elsie, who had a lot of energy and no shame...she seduced me. It was not a success, from Elsie's point of view, because the orgasm for women was just coming into general popularity then, and she didn't have one.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #20

    Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #21

    Faustina is a great work of the Creator. She has nothing of what you call brains; she doesn't need them for her destiny... It is to be glorious for a few years: not to outlive some dull husband and live on his money till she is eighty, going to lectures and comparing the attractions of winter tours that offer the romance of the Caribbean.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #22

    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 Quote #23

    He [Jesus] had a terrible temper, you know, undoubtedly inherited from His Father.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #24

    He liked to make his hearers jump, now and then, and he said that our gravel pit was much the same sort of place as Gehenna. My elders thought this far-fetched, but I saw no reason why hell should not have, so to speak, visible branch establishments throughout the earth, and I have visited quite a few of them since.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #25

    I am quite a wise old bird, but I am no desert hermit who can only prophesy when his guts are knotted with hunger. I am deep in the old man’s puzzle, trying to link the wisdom of the body with the wisdom of the spirit until the two are one.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #26

    I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #29

    I thought I was in love with Leola, by which I meant that if I could have found her in a quiet corner, and if I had been certain that no one would ever find out, and if I could have summoned up the courage at the right moment, I would have kissed her. But, looking back on it now, I know that I was in love with Mrs Dempster. Not as some boys are in love with grown-up women, adoring them from afar and enjoying a fantasy life in which the older woman figures in an idealized form, but in a painful and immediate fashion; I saw her every day, I did menial tasks in her house, and I was charged to watch her and keep her from doing foolish things. Furthermore, I felt myself tied to her by the certainty that I was responsible for her straying wits, the disorder of her marriage, and the frail body of the child who was her great delight in life. I had made her what she was, and in such circumstances I must hate her or love her. In a mode that was far too demanding for my age or experience, I loved her.

  • Robertson Davies Quote #30

    I wanted to get away,' said she; 'everybody wants to plague and worry me about nothing. They'll be all right tomorrow. What's worrying them?'

    'They are sacrificing to our Canadian God,' said Solly. 'We all believe that if we fret and abuse ourselves sufficiently, Providence will take pity and smile upon anything we attempt. A light heart, or a consciousness of desert, attracts ill luck. You have been away from your native land too long. You have forgotten our folkways. Listen to that gang over there; they are scanning the heavens and hoping aloud that it won't rain tomorrow. That is to placate the Mean Old Man in the Sky, and persuade him to be kind to us.

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