A Quote by Robertson Davies

A happy childhood has spoiled many a promising life.

Robertson Davies

Quote Topics

Childhood Happy Happy Childhood Life Many Promising Spoiled

Quote Author

Robertson Davies
Canadian - Novelist
August 28, 1913 - December 2, 1995

They say that childhood forms us, that those early influences are the key to everything. Is the peace of the soul so easily won? Simply the inevitable result of a happy childhood. What makes childhood happy? Parental harmony? Good health? Security? Might not a happy childhood be the worst possible preparation for life? Like leading a lamb to the slaughter.

Josephine Hart

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

Frank McCourt

I was quite shy when I was younger, but I'm not one of those people who can complain of a bad childhood or any trauma. There was none in my life. I had a wonderfully happy childhood.

Emilia Fox

I had a very happy childhood, happy teenage years and I was famous by the time I was 22. A charmed life.

Rik Mayall

It was a wonderful childhood. They spoiled me rotten.

Victor Banerjee

We never got much in the way of material things, but if you can be spoiled by good cooking, my mom spoiled me three times a day all my life.

John Isner

For some men, life seems to be one long attempt to escape childhood and all the fears of childhood. That's what many of us are doing.

Peter Temple

There's so many people who come to me here in L.A., promising me this and promising me that. What I'm learning is figuring out what's real versus what's just talk.

Ryan Garcia

I try for my children to have the most normal life. Obviously, they're spoiled. I'm not saying they're not, because we're all very spoiled. But within that, I'd like them to be as down-to-earth as possible.

Ginevra Elkann

[The political mind] is a strange mixture of vanity and timidity, of an obsequious attitude at one time and a delusion of grandeurat another time. The political mind is the product of men in public life who have been twice spoiled. They have been spoiled with praise and they have been spoiled with abuse.

Calvin Coolidge

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Robert Byrne

All human beings seek the happy life, but many confuse the means - for example, wealth and status - with that life itself. This misguided focus on the means to a good life makes people get further from the happy life. The really worthwhile things are the virtuous activities that make up the happy life, not the external means that may seem to produce it.

Epictetus

Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.

Havelock Ellis

I studied painting and sculpting at school and became an actress by mistake .... I've had many lovers and still have romances. I am very spoiled. All my life, I've had too many admirers.

Gina Lollobrigida

Strangely enough, for many many years I didn't talk about my childhood and then when I did I got a ton of mail - literally within a year I got a couple of thousand letters from people who'd had a worse childhood, a similar childhood, a less-bad childhood, and the question that was most often posed to me in those letters was: how did you get past the trauma of being raised by a violent alcoholic?