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A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.

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
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Writer
William Robertson Davies
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More quotes by Robertson Davies

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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.
Robertson Davies
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In too many modern churches there is no emphasis on theology at all. There is a kind of justification by works or by keeping up with modern trends anything that will drag in a few more people.
Robertson Davies
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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.
Robertson Davies
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All art is holy. Not that it is all long-faced and miserable it can be wild and wooly. But if it transforms you, it is art. And it is holy.
Robertson Davies
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The result of a single action may spread like the circles that expand when a stone is thrown into a pond, until they touch places and people unguessed at by the person who threw the stone.
Robertson Davies
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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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Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.
Robertson Davies
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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.
Robertson Davies
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Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.
Robertson Davies
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here are some homosexuals whom we would do well to take seriously.
Robertson Davies
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But as a skeptic I am dubious about science as about everything else, unless the scientist is himself a skeptic, and few of them are. The stench of formaldehyde may be as potent as the whiff of incense in stimulating a naturally idolatrous understanding.
Robertson Davies
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Fiction is not photography, it's oil painting.
Robertson Davies
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May I make a suggestion, hoping it is not an impertinence? Write it down: write down what you feel. It is sometimes a wonderful help in misery.
Robertson Davies
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What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
Robertson Davies
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No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
Robertson Davies
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Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
Robertson Davies
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It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.
Robertson Davies
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Canada was settled, in the main, by people with a lower middle-class outlook, and a respect, rather than an affectionate familiarity, for the things of the mind.
Robertson Davies
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Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.
Robertson Davies
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Whoever declares a child to be delicate thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.
Robertson Davies