December 2011
19 posts
3 tags
“[M]y spelling is Wobbly. It’s good spelling but it Wobbles, and the...”
– Winnie-the-Pooh, from Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
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“‘Hallo!’ said Piglet, ‘what are you doing?’
...”
– A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
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“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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“Spiritual direction will here help us more than medical treatment. Medicine...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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“Winnie-the-Pooh.
When I first heard his name, I said, just as you are going to...”
– A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
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“Whose souls, albeit in a cloudy memory, yet seek back their good, but, like...”
– Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 524)
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A great fear:
[T]he deepest thirst within him was not adapted to the deepest nature of the world.
~C. S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933)
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On the presentation of women through popular culture, media, and advertising:
It is all a fake, of course; the figures in the popular art are falsely drawn; the real women in bathing suits or tights are actually pinched in and propped up to make them appear firmer and more slender … than nature allows a full-grown woman to be. … As a result we are more and more directing the desires...
6 tags
“This every soul seeketh and for the sake of this doth all her actions, having an...”
– Plato, The Republic (c. 380 BC)
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“The truly wide taste in humanity will similarly find something to appreciate in...”
– C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
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“Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would...”
– C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
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Interesting relativizing of Western assumptions and worldview:
[T]here are still today entire cultures that—on irreproachably rational grounds—find the prevailing prejudices of Western modernity almost comically absurd. I know three African priests—one Ugandan and two Nigerian—who are immensely educated and sophisticated scholars (linguists, philosophers, and historians...
3 tags
Luther on the text “There was no room for them in the inn” (Lk 2:7):
Luther baited his audience by offering a stinging chastisement of the innkeepers, as well as Bethlehem generally, for not making room for Christ. His listeners were undoubtedly shaking their heads in agreement. Luther continued, “There are many of you who think to yourselves, ‘If only I had been there!...
5 tags
CSL really is master of the metaphor.
I am talking of Affection as it is when it exists apart from the other loves. It often does so exist; often not. As gin is not only a drink in itself but also a base for many mixed drinks, so Affection, besides being a love itself, can enter into the other loves and colour them all through and become the very medium in which from day to day they operate.
C....
3 tags
On Need-pleasures (pleasure we receive when a need is fulfilled):
They are not hated once we have had them, but they certainly “die on us” with extraordinary abruptness, and completely. The scullery tap and the tumbler are very attractive indeed when we come in parched from mowing the grass; six seconds later they are emptied of all interest. The smell of frying food is very different...
3 tags
“Men must endure their going hence, even as their coming hither.”
– William Shakespeare, King Lear (1608)
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“[G]reatness develops only at long intervals.”
– Seneca, Moral Letters
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“The short span of sixty years can never shut in the whole of man’s...”
– Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835)
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The most violent century in history
[B]y the end of the 20th century, wars [during that century] had been waged on a scale never before imagined, and a number of Utopian, strictly secularist ideologies—each in its own way the inheritor of the Enlightenment project to remake society on a more rational model and of the late 19th-century project to ‘correct’ human nature through the mechanisms of a provident...