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Robertson Davies

259 quotes

• “They [say] everybody's creative. Well, everybody is. But any real creativity has to rest on a basis of an acquired technique and an acquired knowledge; you can't be creative in a void, or you just get a mess.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I have no skills with machines. I fear them, and because I cannot help attributing human qualities to them, I suspect that they hate me and will kill me if they can.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I have known far too many university graduates, in this country and in my own, who, as soon as they have received the diploma which declares them to be of Certified Intelligence, put their brains in cold storage and never use them again until they are hauled away to the mortuary.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Modern disillusion is unlikely to last forever, and nothing rings so hollow as the angst of yesterday.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Poetry which has decided to do without music, to divorce itself from song, has thrown away much of its reason for being...”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “His face was tense with pain. But then, who notices when they meet a theatre critic whose face is tense with pain? It is one of the marks of the profession.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I once had a dispute with a group of Swedish professors at the University of Uppsala as to which country, Sweden or Canada, was the dullest in the world. It was a draw; they claimed superiority because of their long history, and I claimed it because of Canada's immense land mass, which gives us space for tremendous expansion, even of such things as dullness.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The mind of man, though perhaps the most splendid achievement of evolution, is not, surely, that answer to every problem of the universe. Hamlet suffers, but the Gravediggers go right on with their silly quibbles.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No, the Golden Mean is not a sunny, untroubled nullity, but a deep awareness of possibilities, with one eye cocked toward Comedy and the other eye skewed toward Tragedy, and out of this feat of balanced observation emerges Humour, not as a foolish amusement or an escape from reality, but as a breadth of perception, and what Heracleitus called "an attunement of opposite tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre". A reconciliation of opposites, indeed.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The people who fear humour — and they are many — are suspicious of its power to present things in unexpected lights, to question received opinions and to suggest unforeseen possibilities.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Perhaps the word for the feeling I mean is serenity, a high acceptance, a recognition that Heracleitus's doctrine of eternal flow is a great truth, and while we may not, in ourselves, find the moment when the one element changes into the other, that moment will come and the consciousness of its inevitability may give us courage in adversity, and balance in good fortune.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I knew that he prayed a great deal, of course for help in the examinations. But subsequent clinical experience has convinced me that God is not particularly interested in examinations, just as he won't be dragged into the Stock Market, or being a backer in show business.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “When irony first makes itself known in a young man's life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The ironist is not bitter, he does not seek to undercut everything that seems worthy or serious, he scorns the cheap scoring-off of the wisecracker. He stands, so to speak, somewhat at one side, observes and speaks with a moderation which is occasionally embellished with a flash of controlled exaggeration. He speaks from a certain depth, and thus he is not of the same nature as the wit, who so often speaks from the tongue and no deeper. The wit's desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Art is always at peril in universities, where there are so many people, young and old, who love art less than argument, and dote upon a text that provides the nutritious pemmican on which scholars love to chew.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Naked anger may sometimes be seen in priests of the Church of Rome, but the Church of England prefers the icy smile, the false bonhomie, the sword concealed in the palm-branch.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The inert mind is a greater danger than the inert body, for it overlays and stifles the desire to live.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “A Library goes on as far as thought can reach.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But what ailed Little Eva St. Clair, in Uncle Tom's Cabin? What carried off Little Nell?...They have no clear symptoms, and seem to die of Ingrowing Virtue.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Can you tell me the time of the last complete show?" "You have the wrong number." "Eh? Isn't this the Odeon?" I decide to give a Burtonian answer. "No, 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. Good-night.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The really great eccentrics are all inimitable; they are not possessed by a single oddity; they are, in their deepest selves, unlike the generality of mankind.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Try some Symbolic Logic on your little Couch Potato when you go home, and see what happens.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Those of you who have visited Oxford know what a busy, crowded, noisy place it now is and you might perhaps not guess that it was a university town if it were not that, now and then, the traffic is halted while the Vice-Chancellor, preceded by his two mace-bearers, crosses the street. It must be one of the few places left in the world where self-assertion, covetousness, and the whole world of the combustion engine must come to a halt because somebody distinguished for his intelligence is going about his business.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He was born into, and seems never to have questioned, that English "class system" which has been so much abused in the present century. Indeed, several governments have announced their intention of abolishing it, and the most recent prime minister to retire showed her egalitarian principles by accepting the title of Baroness Thatcher.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “He sets a thief to guard his purse Who trusts a dial with his hours Or bids a sand-glass bleed away his nights, His days, his loves, his pleasures and his powers. The burthen of his years Is Time's soft footfall, Time's soft Falling Through his joys and tears.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “They live and laugh who know the better part — Count length of pleasure not by dial or glass But by the heart; What are our fears When Time's slow footfall, fall, fall Falling Turns lovers' hours to years?”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Love, though sweet, must know its proper station And never seek to rival education.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The brigand's life is a very fine life For men of generous mind; We rob the rich to help the poor And succour oppressed mankind. The rich, dear souls, are close around And it's easy work to skelp 'em; But the poor — damn their eyes — can never be found When we're in the mood to help them.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We are Brigand Philosophers Our hearts are high and cheery, For we know our robbery rests upon A sound economic theory!”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “William Prynne's Histrio-Matrix, the Player's Scourge or Actor's Tragedie (1632), a fat book of more than a thousand pages, which forms an admirable compilation of all the Puritan arguments against the theatre. The work is a classic of abuse and a monument to the misplaced scholarship and zeal of its author. Unluckily for Prynne he referred to women actors as 'notorious whores' meaning a group of French actresses who had appeared at Blackfriars in 1629; the reference was taken to apply to Queen Henrietta Maria and her ladies who were about to perform a pastoral at Whitehall. She made a Star Chamber matter of it and Prynne was fined 35,000 pounds, set in the pillory, shorn of his ears, branded and imprisoned for life. The SL on his cheeks he construed as Stigmata Laudis and bore bravely; it is pleasant to know that the life sentence was revoked by the Parliament of the Commonwealth, for although Prynne was a small-souled and cantankerous zealot with a maggot about homosexuality, he was a courageous fighter and a master of invective.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Shakespeare's Boy Actors (1939).

• “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. They have rushed about the lakes in noisy little boats; they have permitted themselves to be dragged behind other little boats, standing more or less upright on ironing boards; they have immersed themselves in lakes into which countless summer cottage privies drain; they have laboriously pursued summer flirtations, and some of them have achieved gritty conquests on the sands; they have sat in hot little boats waiting to catch fish which they have then had to eat; they have passed many hours changing their skins from pinkish-drab to brown, erroneously believing that they are "storing up sunshine" against the winter months; they have motored penitential distances; they have taken thousands of feet of film of people whose names they will not be able to remember in November. They have amused themselves after their fashion, and I have no quarrel with them.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Three Worlds, Three Summers — But Not the Summer Just Past (1949).

• “Chaucer shares on the literary stock marker have been rising during the past ten years, owing chiefly to the enthusiasm, literary gifts and scholarship of an Oxford don, Nevill Coghill, and secondarily to the British Broadcasting Corporation. The fluctuations of the literary market are familiar to everyone; sometimes there is a fierce flutter in a virtually unknown commodity (like the John Donne boom in the twenties); occasionally an almost dead commodity bursts in new life (as in the Trollope boom of the forties); Foreign Moderns (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Sagan) are eagerly pushed but are apt to collapse suddenly, wiping out those critics who have invested too heavily in them; in the USA the Deep South and Proletarian Anguish are solid, though all else fluctuates unpredictably.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) first seen 1957 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review of the Canterbury Tales (1957).

• “Still haunted by Haiku, and tried my hand at it, but I fall pitifully short of the Wordsworthian touch. But failure in this realm turned my mind to an old enthusiasm of mine, the Welsh englyn. This verse form was derived by the Welsh from the inscriptions which their Roman conquerors put on tombs … A good englym must have four lines, of ten, then six, syllables, the last two lines having seven syllables each. In the first line there must be a break after the seventh, eighth, or ninth syllable, and the rhyme with the second line comes at this break; but the tenth syllable of the first line must either rhyme or be in assonance with the middle of the second line. The last two lines must rhyme with the first rhyme in the first line, but the third or fourth line must rhyme on a weak syllable. Got that?”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) first seen 1959 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Haiku and Englyn" in The Toronto Daily Star (4 April 1959), republished in The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies (1979) edited by Judith Skelton Grant, p. 241.

• “Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Prefer the concrete word to the abstract. Prefer the single word to the circumlocution. Prefer the short word to the long. Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance." … What excellent advice it is, and how it was beaten into my generation of schoolboys... But one may tire of even the best advice, as one may tire of writing according to these precepts. Would we wish to be without the heraldic splendour and torchlight processions that are the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne? Would we wish to sacrifice the orotund, Latinate pronouncements of Samuel Johnson? Would we wish that Dickens had written in the style recommended by the brothers Fowler, who framed the rules I have quoted; what would then have happened to Seth Pecksniff, Wilkins Micawber, and Sairey Gamp, I ask you?”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) first seen 1906 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Writing (1990), he here quotes from The King's English (1906) by Henry Watson Fowler & Francis George Fowler

• “It is mankind's discovery of language which more than any other single thing has separated him from the animal creation. Without language, what concept have we of past or future as separated from the immediate present? Without language, how can we tell anyone what we feel, or what we think? It might be said that until he developed language, man had no soul, for without language how could he reach deep inside himself and discover the truths that are hidden there, or find out what emotions he shared, or did not share, with his fellow men and women. But because this greatest gift of all gifts is in daily use, and is smeared, and battered and trivialized by commonplace associations, we too often forget the splendour of which it is capable, and the pleasures that it can give, from the pen of a master.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: On Seeing Plays (1990).

• “Many many heartfelt thanks for your letter of September 25. Though it filled me with shame and remorse, I was grateful for the Christian impulse which moved you to stretch out a hand to me in my wretchedness. You say "We become that with which we busy our mind." Too true! Alas, too true! I recall that as a boy the school chaplain said to my class, "If you tell dirty jokes you will grow to look like a dirty joke!" This is been my hapless destiny.... Would you do me a favour? Will you send me a photograph of yourself, so that I may behold a countenance suffused with Christian love, and perhaps even repent?”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) first seen 1976 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: To a woman in Manitoba, who sent a letter reproaching Davies for writing "barnyard pornography" in The Rebel Angels (1981), quoted in For Your Eye Alone : Letters 1976-1995 (1999).

• “It seems to me that most of us get all the adventure we are capable of digesting. Personally, I have never had to fight a dozen pirates single-handed, and I have never jumped from a moving express-train onto the back of a horse, and I have never been discovered in the harem of the Grand Turk. I am glad of all these things. They are too rich for my digestion, and I do not long for them. I have all the close shaves and narrow squeaks in my life that my constitution will stand, and my daily struggles with bureaucrats, taxgatherers and uplifters are more exhausting than any encounters with mere buccaneers on the Spanish Main.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The logical thing to do, when the next war comes, is to recruit an army from all those of whatever age or sex who are unable to pass certain basic intelligence tests. This would be a good way of getting rid of a lot of the stupid people who cumber the earth; probably there would be a high percentage of scientists, Civil Servants, uplifters and minor prophets in an armed force collected in such a way. But if every country adopted this method the country with the biggest population of boobs, yahoos and ninnies would win, and I am not entirely sure that we have overall superiority in this respect, though we seem bound in that direction.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But I wonder if people do not attach too much importance to the first-name habit? Every man and woman is a mystery, built like those Chinese puzzles which consist of one box inside another, so that ten or twelve boxes have to be opened before the final solution is found. Not more than two or three people have ever penetrated beyond my outside box, and there are not many people whom I have explored further; if anyone imagines that being on first-name terms with somebody magically strips away all the boxes and reveals the inner treasure he still has a great deal to learn about human nature. There are people, of course, who consist only of one box, and that a cardboard carton, containing nothing at all.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As I plodded back and forth I reflected miserably upon my own political rootlessness, in a world where politics is so important. When I am with Tories I am a violent advocate of reform; when I am with reformers I hold forth on the value of tradition and stability. When I am with communists I become a royalist — almost a Jacobite; when I am with socialists I am an advocate of free trade, private enterprise and laissez-faire. The presence of a person who has strong political convictions always sends me flying off in a contrary direction. Inevitably, in the world of today, this will bring me before a firing squad sooner or later. Maybe the fascists will shoot me, and maybe the proletariat, but political contrariness will be the end of me; I feel it in my bones.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Some people I know were telling me of a curious experience which they had recently; they put a collection of old and rejected household articles in their car and drove to a dump to dispose of them. While busy at the dump, they were accosted by a strange figure, a woman of tall and stately presence, wearing a paper crown and carrying a staff in her hand, who strode majestically through the avenues of ashes, tin cans, dishonoured wash-boilers and superannuated bathtubs, attended by a rabble of admiring children. This apparition hailed my friends in a strange, incoherent, but musical language, and her breath was richly perfumed with bay-rum, or it may have been lilac lotion; she was in fact as high as a kite and as mimsy as a borogrove. Having said her say, she strode off in queenly style, and she and her raffish crew were soon lost in the mazes of the dump... My theory is that this was Titania, the fairy queen, fallen upon evil days, but magnificent in ruin; or it may simply have been some rumdumb old bag with a sense of humour. In either case the matter is worth investigating.”

  Robertson Davies (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. 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 (1913–1995) said by 1995 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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