404 Quotes by Robertson Davies

Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.

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.

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

It is those pent-up, craving children who make all the wars and all the horrors and all the art and all the beauty and discovery in life, because they are trying to achieve what lay beyond their grasp before they were five years old.

Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.

She has been kissed as often as a police-court Bible, and by much the same class of people.

Are you going to be just kind of a walking monument to a job, or are you going to have some kind of really significant inner life of your own? Because the external things the job, the house, the this, the that do not really fill the place inside.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground - not a flying carpet to set you free from probability.