Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
Robertson DaviesRead
They're all so highly educated, you know. Education is a great shield against experience. It offers so much, ready-made and all from the best shops, that there's a temptation to miss your own life in pursuing the lives of your betters. It makes you wise in some ways, but it can make you a blindfolded fool in others.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Education can provide knowledge but may also hinder personal life experience.
In this quote, Robertson Davies suggests that while education is valuable and equips individuals with knowledge, it can also distract them from their own experiences and personal growth. The pursuit of learning can lead one to admire the lives of others—those deemed 'better'—to the extent that one may overlook the richness of their own life. This duality highlights the importance of balancing education with personal experience to avoid becoming overly reliant on external wisdom while neglecting one’s own journey.
Themes
EducationExperienceWisdomLifeKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
During a graduation speech, a speaker might invoke this quote to encourage graduates to seek their own paths.
More from Robertson Davies
All quotes →Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can't help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.
Robertson DaviesRead
This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries.
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Everything matters. The Universe is approximately fifteen billion years old, and I swear that in all that time, nothing has ever happened that has not mattered, has not contributed in some way to the totality.
Robertson DaviesRead
The egotist is all surface; underneath is a pulpy mess and a lot of self-doubt. But the egoist may be yielding and even deferential in things he doesn't consider important; in anything that touches his core he is remorseless.
Robertson DaviesRead
The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to the idealized past.
Robertson DaviesRead
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