Robertson Davies Quotes

I don't recall my parents ever steering me toward or away from science. It was more that I was steered toward learning and excellence in the classroom.

I'm not educated; I'd be a damn fool if I was (educated)!

I didn't wanna be looked at as no idiot, and I didn't wanna feel like I was uneducated, because I really stopped going to school at 15. I was never ignorant, as far as being experienced in classrooms and learning about different subjects and actually soaking it up, so I checked into college for a little bit.

What my father gave me more than anything else is great tutoring and a great brain, frankly. You know, my father's brother was a top person at MIT, went to MIT, graduated from MIT, was a teacher at MIT, a professor at MIT, a great engineer. I mean, you know, I have very good genes.

Education in my family was not merely emphasized, it was our raison d'etre.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

I have witnessed how education opens doors, and I know that when sound instruction takes place, students experience the joys of new-found knowledge and the ability to excel.

Going to college is neither necessary nor sufficient to be well-educated.

We want a corps of educated instructors – we want gratuitous instruction in our academies and colleges. The di minorum of learning ought to be elevated in the scale of public estimation and intellectual endowment.

I've always been a huge proponent for education; I graduated high school at 14 years old and graduated college at 17 years old.

Nothing substitutes for a great education.

Not a Harvard-type education, just a not-sticking-up-a-liquor-store-type education.

I am almost thanking God that I was never educated, for it seems to me that 999 of those who are so, expensively and laboriously, have lost all before they arrive at my age-& remain like Swift's Stulbruggs-cut and dry for life, making no use of their earlier-gained treasures:-whereas, I seem to be on the threshold of knowledge.

I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning.

Would you be a poet Before you've been to school? Ah, well! I hardly thought you So absolute a fool.

I wonder, whether, if I had had any education I should have been more, or less, of a fool than I am. It would have deprived me surely of those exquisite moments of mental flatulence which every now and then inflate the cerebral vacuum with a delicious sense of latent possibilities-of stretching oneself to cosmic limits, and who would ever give up the reality of dreams for relative knowledge?

Education keeps the key of life; and liberal education insures the first conditions of freedom,--namely, adequate knowledge and accustomed thought.

This new England we have invented for ourselves is not interested at all in education. It is only interested in training, both material and spiritual. Education means freedom, it means ideas, it means truth. Training is what you do to a pear tree when you pleach it and prune it to grow against a wall. Training is what you give an airline pilot or a computer operator or a barrister or a radio producer. Education is what you give children to enable them to be free from the prejudices and moral bankruptcies of their elders.

Education is the key. With a really good education, you have a much broader view of the world. Well-educated people can seek help for themselves. They can help others.

I was educated once - it took me years to get over it.

To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know.

...Though there's reasons in things as nobody knows on---- that's pretty much what I've made out; yet some folks are so wise they'll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason's winking at 'em in the corner, and they niver see't.

Study! Study ! Study! Get an education.