Another grave limitation of language is that it cannot, like music or gesture, do more than one thing at once. However the words in a great poet's phrase interinanimate one another and strike the mind as a quasi-instantaneous chord, yet, strictly spe...
If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood as a object. in fact would be for them all that was not 'ant-made'.
Johnson, who defines as 'metrical composition', defines as 'An inventor; an author of fiction; a writer of poems; one who writes in measure'. We can gauge how far we have traveled by comparing this with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary which, after a de...
Unless followed by the world 'education', has now lost this meaning [seeking knowledge or doing something for its own sake -- i.e. 'freely' with no exterior motive]. For that loss, so damanging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank thos...
Like all philosophers, Aristotle gives words the definitions which will be most useful for his own purpose
A dream, strayed into daylight.
I was with book, as a woman is with child.
It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.
And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears a...
I knew the world too well to believe this sudden smiling. (…) The gods never send us this invitation to delight so readily or so strongly as when they are preparing some new agony. We are their bubbles; they blow us big before they prick us.
the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.
I felt ashamed." "But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?" "No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal." "But how could you help that?" "Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are thing...
It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's.
This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It's the being mortal - how shall I say it? ... insufficient.
If we cannot persuade our friends by reasons we must be content "and not bring a mercenary army to our aid" (He meant passions.)
I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything.
The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.
Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying.
What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.
You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended.
The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.
