Robertson Davies Quotes

Well, the fact is that one imagination is critically important, and if you have had your imagination stimulated by what is basically a variety of subjects, you are much more amenable to accepting, to understanding and interacting with the realities of the world.

The ability to perceive or think differently is more important than the knowledge gained.

Critical thinking is not something you do once with an issue and then drop it. It requires that we update our knowledge as new information comes in. Time spent evaluating claims is not just time well spent. It should be considered part of an implicit bargain we've all made.

If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.

Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a method that encourages variety is also the only method that is comparable with a humanitarian outlook.

Learning something means coming into contact with a world of which you know nothing. In order to learn, you must be humble.

The entire world was like a palace with countless rooms whose doors opened into one another. We were able to pass from one room to the next only by exercising our memories and imaginations, but most of us, in our laziness, rarely exercised these capacities, and forever remained in the same room.

Knowing a lot...is a springboard to creativity.

Does the pursuit of truth give you as much pleasure as before? Surely it is not the knowing but the learning, not the possessing but the acquiring, not the being-there but the getting there that afford the greatest satisfaction. If I have exhausted something, I leave it in order to go again into the dark. Thus is that insatiable man so strange: when he has completed a structure it is not in order to dwell in it comfortably, but to start another.

In order to acquire learning, we must first shake ourselves free of it.

A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.

It’s ever been the way of the man of science or philosophy. Most folks stay in the dark and then complain they can’t see nothing.” – Snipes (185)

The charm of knowledge would be small indeed, were it not that there is so much shame to be overcome on the way to it.

When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.

Knowledge is power only when put to use - and then only when the use made of it is constructive.

Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.

You can't educate people that are not healthy. But you certainly can't keep them healthy if they're not educated.

As long as men inquire, they will find opportunities to know more upon these topics than those who have gone before them, so inexhaustibly rich is nature in the innermost diversity of her treasures of beauty, order and intelligence.

Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality.

I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province.

Bodybuilders and fitness people have been using, very extensively, chiropractors in order to stay healthy and fit. Whenever I had a little problem with my body, I always ran to one of my dear friends, Dr Franco Columbo, he was always right there with the adjustments. This is how I found out the best way of going, is to use chiropractors, not only after injuries , but also before injury.

Art is based on order. The world is full of 'sloppy Bohemians' and their work betrays them.

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

I don't think you ever learn just one thing. At some point you start unlearning things. I have been working hard to unlearn everything I know.

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem to know which he doth not.