Owen Barfield Quotes

#1. 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

#2. We make way for the man who boldly pushes past us.

Christian Nestell Bovee

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

Owen Barfield

#4. There is assuredly no more effectual method of clearing up one's own mind on any subject than by talking it over, so to speak, with men of real power and grasp, who have considered it from a totally different point of view.

Thomas Huxley

#5. 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

#6. It's a fun playtime. Please, don't kill it with big words.

Chuck Palahniuk

#7. Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.

Giorgio De Chirico

#8. 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

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

Owen Barfield

#10. I've heard people say My heart stopped - which of course isn't possible unless you've just died - but I now understood where the perception might originate.

Tammara Webber

#11. Chicago is great! It's like the heart of America. It's the center and it's a beautiful city.

Michael Sucsy

#12. Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.

Terry Teachout

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

Owen Barfield

#14. No one has seen God, but I have seen your eyes. (Personne n'a vu Dieu, - Mais j'ai vu tes yeux.)

Charles De Leusse

#15. People think that if you're sexy you have no brains, and if you have brains you aren't in touch with your sexual side. I'm trying to tell people, 'You can have it both ways.'

Erica Durance

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

Owen Barfield

#17. Serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority.

Larry Page

#18. I'm very direct. I don't have tantrums. I don't yell or shout. I do expect an awful lot from my staff, but no more than I expect of myself.

Tom Ford

#19. 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

#20. We as governors, whether we're Republican or Democrat, we really believe that we know what's best for our people. And in Arizona, and particularly we're very interested about natural resources.

Jan Brewer

#21. 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

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

Owen Barfield

#23. 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

#24. I am, he thought dimly, watching a vampire take a piss.

Stephen King

#25. 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

#26. I never see a sign Licensed to sell spirits without thinking that it is a license to ruin souls.

Robert Murray M'Cheyne

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

Owen Barfield