- WIST is my personal collection of quotations, curated for thought, amusement, turn of phrase, historical significance, or sometimes just (often-unintentional) irony. Please feel free to browse and borrow.
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Popular Quotables
- “The Lesson for Today,” A Witness Tree (1942) (5,502)
- “Wealth and Poverty,” speech, National… (5,323)
- Agamemnon, ll. 175-183 [tr. Johnston (2007)] (5,279)
- Nobel prize acceptance speech (10 Dec 1962) (4,793)
- “The Triumph of Stupidity” (10 May 1933) (4,230)
- “In Search of a Majority,” Speech,… (3,606)
- “Get a Knife, Get a Dog, but Get Rid of… (3,417)
- “Hallowed Ground” (1825) (2,909)
- “On The Conduct of Life” (1822) (2,848)
- “The Historian as Participant,” Daedalus… (2,654)
Most Quoted Authors
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Adams, John • Bacon, Francis • Bible • Bierce, Ambrose • Billings, Josh • Butcher, Jim • Chesterton, Gilbert Keith • Churchill, Winston • Einstein, Albert • Eisenhower, Dwight David • Emerson, Ralph Waldo • Franklin, Benjamin • Fuller, Thomas (1654) • Gaiman, Neil • Galbraith, John Kenneth • Gandhi, Mohandas • Goethe, Johann von • Hazlitt, William • Heinlein, Robert A. • Hoffer, Eric • Huxley, Aldous • Ingersoll, Robert Green • James, William • Jefferson, Thomas • Johnson, Lyndon • Johnson, Samuel • Kennedy, John F. • King, Martin Luther • La Rochefoucauld, Francois • Lewis, C.S. • Lincoln, Abraham • Mencken, H.L. • Orwell, George • Pratchett, Terry • Roosevelt, Eleanor • Roosevelt, Theodore • Russell, Bertrand • Seneca the Younger • Shakespeare, William • Shaw, George Bernard • Stevenson, Adlai • Stevenson, Robert Louis • Twain, Mark • Watterson, Bill • Wilde, Oscar- Only the 45 most quoted authors are shown above. Full author list.
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Quotations by Davies, Robertson
The result of a single action may spread like the circles that expand when a stone is thrown into a pond, until they touch places and people unguessed at by the person who threw the stone.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author, editor, publisher
“Literature and Moral Purpose” (1990)
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.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author, editor, publisher
“Too Much, Too Fast” Peterborough Examiner (Canada) (16 Jun 1962)
Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author, editor, publisher
Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack (1967)
(Source)
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author, editor, publisher
Tempest-tost (1951)
Commonly misattributed to Henri-Louis Bergson.
Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines — not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master’s call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author, editor, publisher
Tempest-Tost, ch. 6 (1951)
Imagination is a good horse to carry you over the ground
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author, editor, publisher
The Manticore (1972)
To be a book collector is to combine the worst characteristics of a dope-fiend with those of a miser.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author, editor, publisher
The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks (1985)
If you attack Stupidity, you attack an entrenched interest with friends in government and every walk of public life, and you will make small progress against it.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) Canadian author, editor, publisher
The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks (1949)
(Source)
