Robertson Davies

Music is like wine, the less you know about it the sweeter you like it. 

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words – 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap, than his neighbor, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.

I’ve learned that from my husband, that sort of, you know, ability to not get too high or too low with changes and bumps in the road.

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

If a man owns land, the land owns him.

The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

I am the captain of my soul.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

A character is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza; read it forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing.

Aim for the moon. If you miss, you may hit a star.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.