Best 51 quotes of Philip Zaleski on MyQuotes

A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.

A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.

All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, "It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?" CS Lewis

A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.

As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis's increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

Christian myth, reveals the truth that "the Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed into a hostile world.

Christians who like to write might do as a description of the genus. But the actual species shared more precise characteristics, including intellectual vivacity, love of death, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.

C.S. Lewis had come to demand of his nightly prayers a "realization," "a certain vividness of the imagination and the affectations" – a sure recipe for sleeplessness and misery.

Even while an atheist, he held some things sacred.

Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in the turbulent waters of restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.

Facts seemed to run around and rattle in his head like dried peas, and then suddenly to form a convincing pattern.

Fidelity in marriage requires self-will and self-denial.

He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.

He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him.

He trusted the cosmos – but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.

He was a trifle embarrassed to be deserting his hard-won realism in order to follow what he thought was the dominant philosophical fashion.

He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield

Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.

Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.

Now a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant him during "the fussy, time-wasting, botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing," and, worst of all, the hymns and organ music.

Obedience appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace.

Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.

Oxford was in love with the idea of Christian perfection.

Passion does not translate easily into good income.

Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, "freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.

Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly.

Resignation is the better part of wisdom.

Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.

She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion.

She was simpler, less fractured by life during her youth.

The arts are the best Time Machine we have." C. S. Lewis

The author observes of the Inklings, "they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the "mere Christian," Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.

The authors disclose that in less than a century the word "tension" grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, "The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.

The church marched into his heart. Williams never abandon Anglicanism; he pushed at its borders.

The idyll ended, as idylls must.

The longing for Joy is in itself Joy. When he recalled when he had experienced Joy, he was, in that recollection, experiencing Joy anew, though he knew it not. Joy was not a state; it was an arrow pointing to something beyond all states, something objective yet unattainable – at least in our earthly existence.

The onslaught of scruples is a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly to achieve a certain result.

The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.

This is one of the difficulties and pleasures of studying the Inklings; Christians all, they offer, along with the expected 20th-century psychological explanations for behavior, unexpected spiritual ones.

Tolkien, lucky man, had protected a realm of his own invention to which he could flee. Robert Graves, embittered by battle, writes: The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his… Wisdom made him old and wary banishing his Lords of Faery

Tolkien regretted "the degeneration of real curiosity and enthusiasm," and called for research motivated by love of knowledge rather than hunger for a job.

We must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become.

We still thought that we were the only two people in the world who were interested in the right kind of things in the right kind of way. C.S. Lewis

Williams was complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted.

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.