Robertson Davies

Our age has robbed millions of the simplicity of ignorance, and has so far failed to lift them to the simplicity of wisdom.

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.

Applause we crave, from scorn we take defence
But have no armour 'gainst indifference.

Aristocrats need not be rich, but they must be free, and in the modern world freedom grows rarer the more we prate about it.

One might think, to hear some people talk, that this had been a particularly fine summer. From their point of view, I suppose, it has.

The King had every privilege except that of being at ease. Pompadour provided the atmosphere in which that final luxury was possible.

O, how deeply we should thank God for these impossible people like Berlioz and Dylan Thomas! What a weary, grey, well-ordered, polite, unendurable hell this would be without them!

As the cat is, above all animals, the writer's pet, I suppose I should have written something about it. But I do not care about "weeks", and every week is a cat week with me.

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man's speech with other men's jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

The pleasures of love are for those who are hopelessly addicted to another living creature. The reasons for such addiction are so many that I suspect they are never the same in any two cases.

Sometimes there was a serious article on a hot topic, and I especially remember one by a bishop headed "Is Nudity Salacious?"

I would not for a moment have you suppose that I am one of those idiots who scorns Science, merely because it is always twisting and turning, and sometimes shedding its skin, like the serpent that is its symbol. It is a powerful god indeed but it is what the students of ancient gods called a shape-shifter, and sometimes a trickster.