The Place of the Lion Quotes

“I hope you still think that ideas are more dangerous than material thing," Quentin said. "That is what you were arguing at lunch."
Anthony pondered while glancing from side to side before he answered, "Yes, I do. All material danger is limited, whereas interior danger is unlimited. It's more dangerous for you to hate than kill, isn't it?”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“Have you by any chance an edition of St. Ignatius's treatise against the Gnostics?" he asked in a low clear voice.
The young assistant looked gravely back. "Not for sale, I'm afraid," he said. "Nor, if it comes to that, the Gnostic treatises against St. Ignatius."
"Quite," Anthony answered.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“No mind was so good that it did not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and blindness and bigotry and folly.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“He believes — and I believe it too,” Mr. Foster said, “that this world is created, and all men and women are created, by the entrance of certain greatprinciples into aboriginal matter. We call them by cold names; wisdom and courage and beauty and strength and so on, but actually they are very great and mighty Powers. It may be they are the angels and archangels of which the Christian Church talks — andMiss Damaris Tighe — I do not know. And when That which is behind them intends to put a new soul into matter it disposes them as it will, and by a peculiar mingling of them a child is born; and this is their concern with us, but what is their concern and business among themselves we cannot know. And by this gentle introduction of them, every time in a new and just proportion, mankind is maintained. In the animals they are less mingled, for there each is shown to us in his own becoming shape; those Powers are the archetypes of the beasts, and very much more, but we need not talk of that.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“don’t believe in these things. There’s London and us and the things we know.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“there were supposed to be various classes of angels, who were given different names — to be exact” (“and what is research if it is not exact?” she asked Mrs. Rockbotham, who nodded), “in descending order, seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, princes, powers, archangels, angels. Now these hierarchized celsitudes are but the last traces in a less philosophical age of the ideas which Plato taught his disciples existed in the spiritual world. We may not believe in them as actually existent — either ideas or angels — but here we have what I may call two selected patterns of thought. Let us examine the likenesses between them; though first I should like to say a word on what the path was by which imaginations of the Greek seer became the white-robed beings invoked by the credulous piety of Christian Europe, and familiar to us in many paintings.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“He would probably think that the Good was the same thing as God — like a less educated monk of the Dark Ages. Personification”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“She altered “priestly oppression” into “official influence” almost automatically, however, recalling that Anthony had told”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“opportunism” into “fervent zeal.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“superstitious slavery” into “credulous piety” and “emotional”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“Damaris; upon which he swore he would write a long highbrow article and publish it — Damaris being, for that purpose, a forgotten queen of Trebizond overthrown by the Saracen invasion.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“saying that she had no more notion of Plato than of Charlemagne, and that herreal subject wasDamaristic Tradition at the Court of”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“I hope you still think that ideas are more dangerous than material things,” Quentinsaid. “That was what you were arguing at lunch.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion

“Dearest, I don’t like you a bit,” Anthony interrupted again. “I think you’re a very detestable, selfish pig and prig. But I’m often wildly in love with you, and so I see you’re not. But I’m sure your only chance of salvation is to marry me.”
― Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion