Barfield Quotes & Sayings

The poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old. — Owen Barfield

When we recall the great influence which Spenser's poetry has exerted on English poets who have lived and written since his day, we can clearly see how the two kinds of Platonism - a direct Platonism, and a Platonism long ago transmuted and worked right down into the emotions of common people by the passionate Christianity of the Dark and Middle Ages - combined to beget the infinite suggestiveness which is now contained in such words as 'love' and 'beauty'. Let us remember, then, that every time we abuse these terms, or use them too lightly, we are draining them of their power; every time a society journalist or a film producer exploits this vast suggestiveness to tickle a vanity or dignify a lust, he is squandering a great pile of spiritual capital which has been laid up by centuries of weary effort. — Owen Barfield

In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty. — Owen Barfield

True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment, — Owen Barfield

Therefore it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even at the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether. — Owen Barfield

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

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

There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man's character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words. — Owen Barfield

As we see it, the whole outlook brought about by the scientific revolution should have been
must be
a phase, only, of the evolution of consciousness. An absolutely indispensable phase, but a passing one. What is riveting it on to us and preventing us from superseding it, because it prevents us from even imaging any other kind of consciousness, is precisely this error of projecting it back into the past. — Owen Barfield

If people say the world we perceive is a 'construct' of our brains, they are saying in effect, that it results from an inveterate habit of thought. Why does it never occur to them that a habit is something you can overcome, if you set about it with enough energy? — Owen Barfield

We Person-Centred Approach people are as human as anyone else after all, and, as does everyone, must daily face the difference between our aspirations and stated values, and our actual choices and behaviours, and the resulting outcomes. However, we keep giving ourselves a chance to change, again and again, thus more closely approximating our hopes for how we can be together — Gay Barfield

Before the scientific revolution, [man] did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to quite the same extent that we do. He was integrated, or mortised into it, each different part of him being united to a different part of it by some invisible thread. In his relation to his environment, the man of the middle ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo. — Owen Barfield

I believe I have already suggested that colour is the most obvious bridge between emotion and perception, that is, between subjective experience of the psyche and quality objective in nature. Both light up only between the extremes of light and darkness, and in their reciprocal interplay. Thus, outward the rainbow
or, if you prefer it, the spectrum
is the bridge between dark and light, but inwardly the rainbow is, what the soul itself is, the bridge between body and spirit, between earth and heaven. — Owen Barfield

All conscious nature has experiences of pleasure and pain. Man alone can deliberately will the repetition of an experience. And repetition, experienced as such, is at the heart, for good and evil, of his faculty of reasoning, and thus makes possible his language, his art, his morality, and indeed his humanity. Yet it is the enemy of life, for repetition is itself the principle, not of life but of mechanism. — Owen Barfield

One of his closest friends, Owen Barfield, once said of Lewis that "what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything."12 — Michael Ward

And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things? — Owen Barfield

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

though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed, day by day, for this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure because we look not at what can be seen, but at what cannot be seen. For what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. — Ray Barfield

I've always tried to do my best on the ball field. I can't do any more than that. I always give one hundred percent; and if my team loses, I come back and give one hundred percent the next day. — Jesse Barfield

Throughout history every great empire has collapsed...there have been no exceptions. — Joe Barfield

As his (C. S. Lewis's) good friend Owen Barfield once remarked, Lewis radiated a sense that the spiritual world is home, that we are always coming back to a place we have never yet reached. — David C. Downing

I couldn't miss the irony, not as a forty-two-year-old native of the segregated South, still fighting to earn respect in the color-conscious world of American business. How often had my parents and grandparents, other family members and friends, and I myself been directed to the back door of a bus, a restaurant, or a theater because we were considered second class, even after paying a first-class price for service! But that night we were treated to courtesies that even President Nixon could not enjoy: entering through the lobby, approaching the front desk, quietly registering, and being assisted to our room by the highly trained wait staff. A familiar portion of a Bible verse came to mind. The last shall be first and the first last (Matt. 20:16). — John Barfield

We can only cope with the dangers of language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous. — Owen Barfield

When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis. — Owen Barfield

Though love is a not a fight, its something worth fighting for. — Warren Barfield

When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words. — Owen Barfield

Library terror - that feeling of being hopelessly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of available books ... — Owen Barfield

Everything has a story and every story if it's not told fast is just not gonna be told. But you can't tell every story about everybody and everything. And you can't tell every story fast. Some just have to be trusted to God's memory. You can't even tell every story about yourself to yourself. Some of it just has to be lived. — Raymond Barfield

One time I dropped a fly ball in Milwaukee and, after the game, the writers asked me what happened. I told them, 'Well, I was looking up and a UFO flew right across. It was weird. I never saw anything like that in my life.' Man, I was only joking and they wrote it up and put it in the paper. — Jesse Barfield

The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it. — Owen Barfield

By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one ... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature
for instance in a biological survey of evolution
we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer. — Owen Barfield