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"Christianity...brought peace to the region of the Mediteranean, and with it made possible the development of Roman law and the growth of a new and life giving religion." (pg 354 in Social Life in Rome, W Warde Fowler) Thought: that the stability of later Rome was held because of God's will to spread Christianity to the farthest reachs of the empire.
"...but that as the human face, so is its copy- futile and perishing, while the form of the mind is eternal..." (pg 5 Everyday Life in Rome and Anglo-Saxon Times, Marjorie & C.H.B Quennell)
"Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguements he had heard on this subject." (pg 279 The Cosmic Trilogy, C.S. Lewis specificaly perelandra)
Lewis' thoughts on new learning ideas "The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly: the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds- making them thus and thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a way of propagation- men transmitting manhood to men: the new is merely propaganda." (The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis p436 The Essential C.S. Lewis)
"My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?" (A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis p76)
"There must have been a great mob of the rabble too; in the pauses you could hear (who can mistake it?) their noise. No herd of other beasts, gathered together, has so ugly a voice as Man." (Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis, p79)
"The Book of Nature and the Word of God eminate from the same infallible Author, and therefore cannot be at variance. But man is a fallible interpreter, and by making one or both of these Divine Records, he forces them too often into unnatural conflict." (Pratt, found in The Christian View of Science and Scripture p.37 by Bernard Ramm)
"It took place in a large, enclosed space in one of our best hotels, which could not be called a room, because it had no architectural concentration to point an audience in any single direction. It was simply a huge, carpeted area, windowless and in no way associated with either nature or art, and its multitude of electric lights could not wholly dispel its cavern like quality." (Robertson Davies, Murther & Walking Spirits, page 40)
"Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn." C.S. Lewis ?
"And often times, the instruments of darkness, tell us small truths, to betray us in deepest consequence." William Shakespear
“ Indeed I have no cause for complaint on the grounds that God has not given me a greater power of understanding or a greater light nature than he has, for it is of the essence of a finite intellect not to understand many things, and it is of the essence of a created intellect to be finite. Actually, instead of thinking that he has withheld from me or deprived me of those things he has not given me, I ought to thank God, who never owed me anything, for what he has bestowed upon me." (Rene Descartes, Fourth Meditation)
"But in such fantasy, as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a subcreator." (J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: on Fairy-Stories)
on fairy-tale and the significance of prohibition "Thou shalt not---or else thou shalt depart beggared into endless regret." and "The Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation." (J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: on Fairy-Stories pp. 32-33)
"Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability." (J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf: on Fairy-Stories p. 40)
"Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons---'twas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed:
we make still by the law in which we're made." (Tolkien, a letter to a
anti-fantacy critic)
"A man cannot love himself; he can only idolize it, and over the idol delightfully tyrannize--- without purpose." (Williams, Charles. Descent Into Hell. p. 127)
"If I have taught you to carry the cross and to die on it, then I have taught you everything. Have I thaught you this." (p. 19. Father Elijah. Michael O'brien)
"I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking!" (Lilith, George MacDonald, p. 84)
"Now a promise made is a debt unpaid..." (Robert W. Service, 'The Cremation of Sam McGee' )
"Toiling,---rejoicing,---sorrowing,/ Onward through life he goes;/ Each morning sees it close;/ Something attempted, something done,/ Has earned a night's repose./ Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,/ For the lesson thou hast taught!/ Thus at the flaming forge of life/ Our fortunes must be wrought;/ Thus on its sounding anvil shaped/ Each burning deed and thought." (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'The Village Blacksmith')
"There's a race of men that don't fit in,/ A race that can't stay still;/ ...If they just went straight they might go far;/ They are strong and brave and true;/ But they're always tired of the things that are,/ And they want the strange and new./ ...It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones/ Who win in the lifelong race./ He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;/ He has just done things by half." (Robert W. Service, 'The Men that Don't Fit In')
"...I got the idea in my head---and I could not get it out---that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seems like exactly the same thing to me if you take off the wrapping---and it still does." (Franny and Zooey, J.D. Salinger, p. 146)
"Since you wish, hear me now. Give me your heart and your ears, for words are lost completely unless they are understood by the heart. There are people who hear but do not understand, although they praise what they hear. Now they are capable only of hearing because their heart does not understand. The words come like the blowing wind to their ears; they do not linger or stay there, but pass quickly unless the heart is alert and ready to receive them. When they are heard, the heart can receive and enclose them, and make them stay. The ears are the route and channel the voice takes to the heart, and the heart embraces, inside the body, the voice that enters through the ears. I don't intend to speak of some dream, idle tale, or lie." (The Knight with the Lion from The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes on page 259 trans. David Staines)
"Man is always more
than he knows or can know about himself." (Jaspers, Karl. Existenzphilosophie
on page 178 of Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre)
