Owen Barfield Quotes

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

— Owen Barfield

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

— Owen Barfield

“All conscious nature has experiences of pleasure and pain. Man alone can deliberately will the repetition of an experience. And repetition, experienced as such, is at the heart, for good and evil, of his faculty of reasoning, and thus makes possible his language, his art, his morality, and indeed his humanity. Yet it is the enemy of life, for repetition is itself the principle, not of life but of mechanism.”

— Owen Barfield

“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

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

— Owen Barfield

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

— Owen Barfield

“When we recall the great influence which Spenser's poetry has exerted on English poets who have lived and written since his day, we can clearly see how the two kinds of Platonism - a direct Platonism, and a Platonism long ago transmuted and worked right down into the emotions of common people by the passionate Christianity of the Dark and Middle Ages - combined to beget the infinite suggestiveness which is now contained in such words as 'love' and 'beauty'. Let us remember, then, that every time we abuse these terms, or use them too lightly, we are draining them of their power; every time a society journalist or a film producer exploits this vast suggestiveness to tickle a vanity or dignify a lust, he is squandering a great pile of spiritual capital which has been laid up by centuries of weary effort.”

— Owen Barfield

“True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment,”

— Owen Barfield

“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

“Therefore it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even at the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether.”

— Owen Barfield

“As we see it, the whole outlook brought about by the scientific revolution should have been
must be
a phase, only, of the evolution of consciousness. An absolutely indispensable phase, but a passing one. What is riveting it on to us and preventing us from superseding it, because it prevents us from even imaging any other kind of consciousness, is precisely this error of projecting it back into the past.”

— Owen Barfield

“I believe I have already suggested that colour is the most obvious bridge between emotion and perception, that is, between subjective experience of the psyche and quality objective in nature. Both light up only between the extremes of light and darkness, and in their reciprocal interplay. Thus, outward the rainbow
or, if you prefer it, the spectrum
is the bridge between dark and light, but inwardly the rainbow is, what the soul itself is, the bridge between body and spirit, between earth and heaven.”

— Owen Barfield

“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

“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one ... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature
for instance in a biological survey of evolution
we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”

— Owen Barfield

“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

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

— Owen Barfield

“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