Owen Barfield Quotes

#1. True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment,

Owen Barfield

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.

Owen Barfield

#5. Library terror - that feeling of being hopelessly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of available books ...

Owen Barfield

#6. The poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.

Owen Barfield

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis.

Owen Barfield

#10. 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

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

Owen Barfield