Robertson Davies

Did you ever think that these three men [ Freud, Adler and Jung] who were so splendid at understanding others had first to understand themselves? It was from their self-knowledge they spoke. They did not go trustingly to some doctor and follow his lead because they were too lazy or too scared to make the inward journey alone. They dared heroically...Was their heroism simply meant to raise a whole new crop of invalids?

A slovenly action, thrice repeated, has become a habit.

Be sure you choose what you believe and know why you believe it, because if you don't choose your beliefs, you may be certain that some belief, and probably not a very creditable one, will choose you.

There are the There-But-for-the-Grace-of-Godders who seem to think it is only by a narrow squeak that they have kept out of the prisoner's dock themselves; they are bird-brains to whom God's grace and good luck mean the same thing.

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.

Life, as he conceived of it, was a long decline from a glorious past, and if a reader approaches a newspaper in that spirit, he can find much to confirm him in his belief, particularly if he has never examined any short period of the past in day-to-day detail.

She was a short, stout woman, shaped like a cottage loaf. A nubbin, with a twist of whispy hair on it, formed her head; a larger nubbin comprised her bust and upper reaches; the largest nubbin of all was formed by her spreading hips. She must have had legs, but her skirts concealed them. She had little to say, and it is doubtful if her mental processes could be called thought; they consisted of a series of dissolving views, mostly of possible disasters and misfortunes which might overtake her and her family.

The borborygmy, or rumbling of the stomach, has not received the attention from either art or science which it deserves. It is as characteristic of each individual as the tone of the voice. It can be vehement, plaintive, ejaculatory, conversational, humorous - its variety is boundless. But there are few who are prepared to give it an understanding ear; it is dismissed too often with embarrassment or low wit.

Willard liked best to steal from the local cop, but as cops rarely had much money this was a larcenous foppery which he did not often allow himself.

I know what a heavy burden everybody carries of the unconfessed, which sometimes appears to be unspeakable. Very often such stuff is not disgraceful or criminal; it is merely a sense of not having behaved well or having done something one knew to be contrary to someone else's good; of having snatched when one should have waited decently; of having turned a sharp corner when someone else was thereby left in a difficult situation; of having talked of the first-rate when was planning to do the second-rate; of having fallen below whatever standards one had set oneself.

"Wet", said he. Classics was his subject, and he sometimes affected a classical simplicity in social conversation.

People who think of beds only in terms of sexual exercise or sleep simply do not understand that a bed is the best of all places for a philosophical discussion, an argument, and if necessary a showdown. It was not by chance that so many kings of old administered justice from their beds, and even today there is something splendidly parliamentary about an assembly of concerned persons in a bed.