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And I say to you that if you bring curiosity to your work it will cease to be merely a job and become a door through which you enter the best that life has to give you.

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
Best
Cease
Giving
Merely
Work
Door
Life
Doors
Bring
Jobs
Become
Enter
Give
Curiosity

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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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It is a waste of time to dissipate one's moral zeal in disapproving of royal persons who have mistresses.
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Love affairs are for emotional sprinters the pleasures of love are for the emotional marathoners.
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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.
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There is no disputing about tastes, says the old saw. In my experience there is little else.
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Childhood may have periods of great happiness, but it also has times that must simply be endured. Childhood at its best is a form of slavery tempered by affection.
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The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need.
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Boredom and stupidity and patriotism, especially when combined, are three of the greatest evils of the world we live in.
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It is odd how all men develop the notion, as they grow older, that their mothers were wonderful cooks. I have yet to meet a man who will admit that his mother was a kitchen assassin and nearly poisoned him.
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Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling.
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Computers will have to learn that when I quote from some old author who spelled differently from the machine, the wishes of the long-dead author will have to be respected, and the machine will have to mind its manners
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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.
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I saw corpses, and grew used to their unimportant look, for a dead man without any of the panoply of death is a desperately insignificant object.
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The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty.(...) Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone.
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here are some homosexuals whom we would do well to take seriously.
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I do not really like vacations. I much prefer an occasional day off when I do not feel like working. When I am confronted with a whole week in which I have nothing to do but enjoy myself I do not know where to begin. To me, enjoyment comes fleetingly and unheralded I cannot determinedly enjoy myself for a whole week at a time.
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What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
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No people in the world can make you feel so small as the English.
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The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.
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If we seek the pleasures of love, passion should be occasional, and common sense continual.
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