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The egotist is all surface underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn't consider important in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.

Robertson Davies

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Robertson Davies
Age: 82 †
Born: 1913
Born: August 28
Died: 1995
Died: December 3
Journalist
Literary Critic
Musicologist
Novelist
Playwright
Professor
Reporter
Writer
William Robertson Davies
Even
Surface
Egoist
Things
Consider
Egotist
Doubt
Remorseless
Doesn
Yielding
Anything
Underneath
May
Touches
Self
Mess
Deferential
Important
Core
Pulpy

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Canada, having few indigenous prejudices, has been compelled to import them from elsewhere, duty-free, and it is the rare Canadian who is not shaken, at some time in the year, by old, unhappy, far-off things / And battles long ago, like Wordsworth's solitary reaper. We are a nation of immigrants, and not happy in our minds.
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Very few [doctors] are men of science in any very serious sense they're men of technique.
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The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
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We live in a world where bulk is equated with quality.
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In my experience tact is usually worse than the brutalities of truth.
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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.
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All mothers think their children are oaks, but the world never lacks for cabbages.
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Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
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On the whole, we treat the Devil shamefully, and the worse we treat Him the more He laughs at us.
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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.
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I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.
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I don't suppose God laughs at the people who think He doesn't exist. He's above jokes. But the devil isn't. That's one of his most endearing qualities.
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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.
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Whoever declares a child to be delicate thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.
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The division between art and deviousness and crime is sometimes as thin as a cigarette paper.
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Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman.
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There is absolutely no point in sitting down to write a book unless you feel that you must write that book, or else go mad, or die.
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Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.
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Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.
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The Alexander Technique keeps the body alive, at ages when many people have resigned themselves to irreversible decline.
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