Philip Zaleski Quotes & Sayings

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

Charles Williams loved his son with reservations, complaining that "a child is a guest of a somewhat inconsistent temperament, rather difficult to get rid of, almost pushing; a poor relation rather than a pleasant kind. — Philip Zaleski

Passion does not translate easily into good income. — Philip Zaleski

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

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

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. — Philip Zaleski

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

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. — Philip Zaleski

Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love. — Philip Zaleski

Fidelity in marriage requires self-will and self-denial. — Philip Zaleski

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

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

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write. — Philip Zaleski

Oxford was in love with the idea of Christian perfection. — Philip Zaleski

They shared much with Bloomsbury, including love of beauty, companionship, and conversation, but they differed from their older London counterpart in their religious ardor, their social conservatism, and their embrace of fantasy, myth, and (mostly) conventional literary techniques instead of those dazzling experiments with time, character, narrative, and language that mark the modernist aesthetic. — Philip Zaleski

Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness. — Philip Zaleski

Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness". — Philip Zaleski

J.R.R. Tolkien told a questioning correspondent, life's purpose is to know, praise, and thank God. — Philip Zaleski

Like other intellectuals, he welcomed the mindless drudgery as a refreshing change of pace. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. — Philip Zaleski

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

A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos. — Philip Zaleski

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures. — Philip Zaleski

They listened to the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, heard the horns of Elfland, and made designs on the culture that our own age is only beginning fully to appreciate. They were philologists and philomyths: lovers of logos (the ordering power of words) and mythos (the regenerative power of story), with a nostalgia for things medieval and archaic and a distrust of technological innovation that never decayed into the merely antiquarian. Out of the texts they studied and the tales they read, they forged new ways to convey old themes - sin and salvation, despair and hope, friendship and loss, fate and free will - in a time of war, environmental degradation, and social change. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

The idyll ended, as idylls must. — Philip Zaleski

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests. — Philip Zaleski

Lewis spoke for almost every member when he said, "There is no sound I like better than adult male laughter. — Philip Zaleski

Oxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment. — Philip Zaleski

As the honors accrued, creativity diminished. — Philip Zaleski

The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

Language construction will BREED a mythology. J.R.R. Tolkien — Philip Zaleski

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

Resignation is the better part of wisdom. — Philip Zaleski

A Christian's duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate "X" but to make life with "X" an occasion to work on one's own character flaws. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

After reading binge prompted by convalescence, "As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair. — Philip Zaleski

A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all. — Philip Zaleski

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

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

I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: "Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him." And they cried out in a great voice: "He made us." CS Lewis — Philip Zaleski

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

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. — Philip Zaleski

their great hope was to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty. — Philip Zaleski

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness. — Philip Zaleski

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly. — Philip Zaleski

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. — Philip Zaleski

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

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. — Philip Zaleski

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

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission. — Philip Zaleski

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

The artist became a subcreator. — Philip Zaleski

Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world. — Philip Zaleski

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

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 — Philip Zaleski

And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to "cellar door": "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me - 'cellar door,' say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Selador,' and from that a character, a situation begins to grow. — Philip Zaleski

It's not easy being a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand. — Philip Zaleski

He had found his vocation: to fight the Lord's battles in the Academy and the world at large. — Philip Zaleski

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 — Philip Zaleski

Even while an atheist, he held some things sacred. — Philip Zaleski