Top 67 Zaleski Quotes
#1. J.R.R. Tolkien told a questioning correspondent, life's purpose is to know, praise, and thank God.
Philip Zaleski
#2. 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
#3. After reading binge prompted by convalescence, "As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace.
Philip Zaleski
#4. She was simpler, less fractured by life during her youth.
Philip Zaleski
#5. Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.
Philip Zaleski
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. The church marched into his heart. Williams never abandon Anglicanism; he pushed at its borders.
Philip Zaleski
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals.
Philip Zaleski
#13. Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime at Oxford, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.
Philip Zaleski
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.
Philip Zaleski
#18. Now he must put into practice all his fine poetic thoughts about romantic love.
Philip Zaleski
#19. Even while an atheist, he held some things sacred.
Philip Zaleski
#20. Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.
Philip Zaleski
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Like other intellectuals, he welcomed the mindless drudgery as a refreshing change of pace.
Philip Zaleski
#25. He would henceforth worship and defend the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy.
Philip Zaleski
#26. Obedience appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace.
Philip Zaleski
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him.
Philip Zaleski
#31. One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.
Philip Zaleski
#33. We can be dry as dust, distracted and insensible to God's presence. Still we can pray ... and if we make even the smallest gesture of availability he will be there.
Carol Zaleski
#35. He had found his vocation: to fight the Lord's battles in the Academy and the world at large.
Philip Zaleski
#36. 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
#37. It's not easy being a missionary, even with the key to the cosmos in your hand.
Philip Zaleski
#38. Oxford was in love with the idea of Christian perfection.
Philip Zaleski
#39. 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
#40. Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly.
Philip Zaleski
#41. A brilliant treatment of the history of Purgatory in England and its survivals and echoes throughout Shakespeare's plays, above all Hamlet.
Carol Zaleski
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.
Philip Zaleski
#48. 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
#49. A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.
Philip Zaleski
#50. 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
#51. A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.
Philip Zaleski
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. Language construction will BREED a mythology. J.R.R. Tolkien
Philip Zaleski
#55. Facts seemed to run around and rattle in his head like dried peas, and then suddenly to form a convincing pattern.
Philip Zaleski
#56. 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
#57. Passion does not translate easily into good income.
Philip Zaleski
#58. Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.
Philip Zaleski
#59. Lewis spoke for almost every member when he said, "There is no sound I like better than adult male laughter.
Philip Zaleski
#60. A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.
Philip Zaleski
#61. 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
#62. Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.
Philip Zaleski
#63. 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
#64. Like all great readers, he could create for himself a "wall of stillness".
Philip Zaleski
#65. Fidelity in marriage requires self-will and self-denial.
Philip Zaleski
#66. Christian myth, reveals the truth that "the Christian was (and is) still like his forefathers a mortal hemmed into a hostile world.
Philip Zaleski
#67. The arts are the best Time Machine we have." C. S. Lewis
Philip Zaleski
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