Robertson Davies on quotations

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.

When irony first makes itself known in a young man’s life, it can be like his first experience of getting drunk; he has met with a powerful thing which he does not know how to handle.

The wit’s desire is to be funny; the ironist is only funny as a secondary achievement.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Oscar Wilde1854–1900De Profundis (1897)

A witty saying proves nothing.

Voltaire1694–1778Le dîner du comte de Boulainvilliers (1767): Deuxième Entretien

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882May 1849