Students today are a pretty solemn lot. One of the really notable achievements of the twentieth century has been to make the young old before their time.
Robertson Davies

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.
Robertson Davies

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Robertson Davies

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.
Robertson Davies

The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.
Robertson Davies

The love of truth lies at the root of much humor.
Robertson Davies

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.
Robertson Davies

The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.
Robertson Davies

The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealised past.
Robertson Davies

Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.
Robertson Davies

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.
Robertson Davies

To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.
Robertson Davies

Tristan and Isolde were lucky to die when they did. They'd have been sick of all that rubbish in a year.
Robertson Davies

We wanted to meet him, for though we were neither of us naive people we had not wholly lost our belief that it is delightful to meet artists who have given us pleasure.
Robertson Davies

What we call luck is the inner man externalized. We make things happen to us.
Robertson Davies

You never see what you want to see, forever playing to the gallery.
Robertson Davies