Jocelyn Gibb Quotes

#1. God's goodness will not mean a spoiling indulgence; [H]is aim need not be our ease so much as our perfection.

Jocelyn Gibb

#2. he almost never spoke about himself, in my hearing at least: though once, shortly after his marriage, when he brought his wife to lunch with me, he said...looking at her across the grassy quadrangle, 'I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties.

Jocelyn Gibb

#3. If the requirements of world-structure are so inexorable, what scope is there for a free providence in distributing pleasures and pains? If pains are the natural rubs of a world-structure bearing on sentient creatures, what need have we to view them as instruments of a disciplinary providence?

Jocelyn Gibb

#4. What a pity it is that by such superfluous unrealities he should furnish the public with excuses to evade the overwhelming realism of his moral theology!

Jocelyn Gibb

#5. Lewis said sadly to me, 'When I at last realized that I was not, after all, going to be a great man...' I think he meant 'a great poet.

Jocelyn Gibb

#6. His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking...It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement.

Jocelyn Gibb

#7. His sentences are in homely English, and yet there is something Roman in the easy handling of clauses, and something Greek in their ascent from analogy to idea.

Jocelyn Gibb

#8. The gift of phrase was instantaneous to him in him, and that must partly account for his huge output; but there was a plentitude of mind as well as a swiftness of phrase to help him; he never put a nib wrong.

Jocelyn Gibb

#9. Muddled minds read him, and found themselves moving with delight in a world of clarity.

Jocelyn Gibb

#10. Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness?

Jocelyn Gibb

#11. God's 'permission' of evil so multiplied is not simply to be accounted for by his respecting our free will. He takes the harms we mutually inflict and overrules them for our good.

Jocelyn Gibb

#12. a favourite couplet of Dunbar's sums up his view of the whole duty and delight of Man:

Man, please thy Maker and be merry
And give not for this world a cherry.

Jocelyn Gibb

#13. His tastes were essentially for what had magnitude and a suggestion of myth: the heroic and the romantic never failed to excite his imagination

Jocelyn Gibb

#14. [Lewis had a] determined impersonality towards all except his very close friends.

Jocelyn Gibb

#15. What will has caused, will must be brought to correct.

Jocelyn Gibb

#16. He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short.

Jocelyn Gibb

#17. When under suffering we see good men go to pieces we do not witness the failure of a moral discipline to take effect; we witness the advance of death where death comes by inches.

Jocelyn Gibb

#18. No one knew better than he how an understanding of poetry depends on an understanding of the poet's universe.

Jocelyn Gibb

#19. He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era

Jocelyn Gibb

#20. Man, to Lewis, is an immortal subject; pains are his moral remedies, salutary disciplines, willing sacrifices, playing their part in a drama of interchange between God and him.

Jocelyn Gibb

#21. life-giving generosity was another depth in Lewis's nature that was part of his greatness

Jocelyn Gibb

#22. It is one thing to understand the doctrine, and quite another to be masters of the controversy.' Lewis's ambition was of course to know the doctrine and to be master of the controversy.

Jocelyn Gibb

#23. Like Johnson, Lewis was more impressive in his conversation than in his poetry, and more impressive in his prose - particularly in his learned prose - than in his conversation.

Jocelyn Gibb

#24. His Christianity, so important to him personally, was also important professionally, for it enabled him to enter into fuller imaginative sympathy with the Middle Ages and Renaissance...and give spiritual substance to his life's work in those fields, so penetrated by Christian thought.

Jocelyn Gibb

#25. Fine scholar though he was, he was an even better teacher; and it may truly be said of him...that in turning men's minds to the Middle Ages he 'stimulated their mental thirst...silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles'.

Jocelyn Gibb

#26. It delighted him that he could find no use of the word modern in Shakespeare that did not carry its load of contempt.

Jocelyn Gibb