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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.

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
Needs
Gone
Bravery
Kind
Age
Despise
Never
Fighting
Enemies
Think
Rather
Killing
Thinking
Living
Beyond
People
Doesn
Modern
Nothing
Humanity
Despises
Need
Enemy
Warfare

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A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.
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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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It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.
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Let people alone. Let them find their way. Let them find their level and you may sometimes be delighted and astonished at the extraordinary high level to which they'll rise if they're let alone.
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There is no nonsense so gross that society will not, at some time, make a doctrine of it and defend it with every weapon of communal stupidity.
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Civilization rests on two things, said Hitzig the discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, and voluntary ability to inhibit defecation. And I put it to you, where would this splendidly civilized occasion be without both?
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I cannot imagine any boy of spirit who would not be delighted to play a drunkard even to vomiting in front of his Sunday school. Indeed, the vomiting might be the chief attraction of the role.
Robertson Davies
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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.
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Pornography is rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having somebody tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.
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Many a promising career has been wrecked by marrying the wrong sort of woman.
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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.
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The ideal companion in bed is a good book.
Robertson Davies
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Speakers' nerves affect them in various ways. Some tremble, some become frenzied. I lose all confidence, and suffer from a leaden oppression that makes me wonder why I ever agreed to speak at all the Tomb and the Conqueror Worm seem preferable to delivering the stupid and piffling speech I have so carefully prepared.
Robertson Davies
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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.
Robertson Davies
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People are not saints just because they haven't got much money or education.
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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It is in this matter that I fall foul of so many American writers on writing they seem to think that writing is a confidence game by means of which the author cajoles a restless, dull-witted, shallow audience into hearing his point of view. Such an attitude is base, and can only beget base prose.
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Every man makes his own summer. The season has no character of its own, unless one is a farmer with a professional concern for the weather.
Robertson Davies
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That's the nub of the thing, you see seriousness of spirit. It doesn't mean heaviness of heart, or a lack of fantasy, but it does mean an awareness of influences that touch our lives, sometimes in ways that seem cruel and unfeeling, and sometimes in ways that open up a glory which can never be forgotten.
Robertson Davies
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The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness who read for pastime but not to kill time who love books, but do not live by books
Robertson Davies