404 Quotes by Robertson Davies

No people on earth can make you feel so small as the English

I think we're living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn't need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.

The world is burdened with young fogies. Old men with ossified minds are easily dealt with. But men who look young, act young and everlastingly harp on the fact that they are young, but who nevertheless think and act with a degree of caution that would be excessive in their grandfathers, are the curse of the world. Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

Clarity is not a characteristic of the human spirit.

Pessimism is a very easy way out when you're considering what life really is, because pessimism is a short view of life - If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of man or the future of the world

The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne.

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

If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional and common sense continual.

We have educated ourselves into a world from which wonder, and he fear and dread and splendor and freedom of wonder have been banished. Of course wonder is costly. You couldn't incorporate it into a modern state, beacuse it is the antithesis of the anxiously worshiped security which is what a modern state is asked to give. Wonder is marvellous but it is also cruel, cruel, cruel. It is undemocratic, discriminatory and pitiless.