Robertson Davies Quotes

That's the number one thing I hear about humans. You have all these choices, so you're confused all the time, and you think so much that you're never happy.

It's not because my mind is made up that I don't want you to confuse me with any more facts. It's because my mind isn't made up. I already have more facts than I can cope with.

Distortion upon distortion: . . . the more one uses the mind, the more confused one becomes.

All the theories mess you up inside.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

When men think much, they can rarely decide.

We are deluged with information. We have to process now three times as much data as we would have done 50 years ago. We're bombarded with tweets, with emails - a state of continuous disruption - and that's bad for our decision making and bad for our thinking.

Yes, at times in front of goal a fog descends. Perhaps the speed of my feet doesn't match up with that of my mind.

What's clarity like? Try to remember that funny feeling inside your head when you had math problems too difficult to solve: the faint buzzing noise in your ears, a heaviness on both sides of your skull, and the sensation that your brain is twitching inside your cranium like a fish on the beach. This is the opposite sensation of clarity. Yet for many people of my era, as they aged, this sensation became the dominant sensation of their lives. It was as though day-to-day twentieth century living had become an unsolvable algebraic equation.

We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.

The media know exactly what they're doing, focusing our attention on Arsenio's hairdo. We need to keep our brains brimming with rubbish. If we didn't, we might think about things.

When I start thinking, all is lost.

I'm the most indecisive person in the world. I'll do three versions of a song, then think, "Is the demo better?"

There is simply too much to think about.

You think you want to know something, and then once you do, all you can think about is erasing it from your mind.

I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.

The moment I think about past letdowns or future hypotheticals, I mentally put myself on shaky ground. If I clear my mind of chatter, I can succeed, just like I did in 2006.

When you're thinking about something that you don't understand, you have a terrible, uncomfortable feeling called confusion... Now, is the confusion's because we're all some kind of apes that are kind of stupid working against this, trying to figure out [how] to put the two sticks together to reach the banana and we can't quite make it... So I always feel stupid. Once in a while, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana.

We spend the early years feeding our brains with information and the latter half trying not to think about it all.

The more time you have to think things through, the more you have to screw it up.

When you're young, you're very insecure. And if I could learn, if I could revisit my own past I could say to myself, don't think too much, just get on and do it.

The most effortful forms of slow thinking are those that require you to think fast.

I mean we know that some choice makes you better off than no choice. Now do we get better off if we go from a lot of choice versus a few choices? And there I think the answer is much, much, much more complicated.

Thinking about something is like picking up a stone when taking a walk, either while skipping rocks on the beach, for example, or looking for a way to shatter the glass doors of a museum. When you think about something, it adds a bit of weight to your walk, and as you think about more and more things you are liable to feel heavier and heavier, until you are so burdened you cannot take any further steps, and can only sit and stare at the gentle movements of the ocean waves or security guards, thinking too hard bout too many things to do anything else.

Don't think too much. That makes you believe you have more choices than you do. Then you mind becomes confused.