“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat mac...”
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Author detail
William Robertson Davies (28 August 1913 – 2 December 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", a term Davies gladly accepted for himself. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
Quotes
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“Oho, now I know what you are. You are an advocate of Useful Knowledge.... Well, allow me to introduce myself to you as an advocate of Ornamental Knowledge. You like the mind to be a neat mac...”
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“At school I was a nuisance, for my father was now Chairman of our Continuation School Board, and I affected airs of near-equality with the teacher that must have galled her; I wanted to argu...”
“A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.”
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“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.”
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“So -- I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in...”
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“Schoolmastering kept me busy by day and part of each night. I was an assistant housemaster, with a fine big room under the eaves of the main building, and a wretched kennel of a bedroom, and...”
“Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.”
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“Extraordinary people survive under the most terrible circumstances and they become more extraordinary because of it.”
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“To be a book-collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope fiend with those of a miser.”
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“The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring.”
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“A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.”
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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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“Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and...”
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“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.”
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“I see Canada as a country torn between a very northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and its desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.”
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