History in English Words Quotes

“We can only cope with the dangers of language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“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, History in English Words

“True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment,”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment, and we can only learn to view anything with detachment by comparing it with other things which are both like and unlike it. We cannot understand the present without a knowledge of the past, our native land without having spent some time in a foreign country, our mother-tongue without a working knowledge of at least two other languages. Without such knowledge, our love of ourselves at the present moment, of our country, of our language, remains an ignorant idolatry, exemplified by the Frenchman who said: “The great advantage of the French language is that in it the words occur in the order in which one thinks them.” In”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“Wordsworth's called The Tables Turned: Sweet is the lore which nature brings:
  Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things—
  We murder to dissect.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“Nobody who understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the philosophy of the Middle Ages.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“Plato had to make the tremendous effort (it is one of the most exhausting which man is called on to exert) of turning a vague feeling into a clear thought.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us a knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“When a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“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, History in English Words

“It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us a knowledge of outward, dead things such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men-language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“When we reflect on the history of such notions as humour, influence, melancholy, temper, and the rest, it seems for the moment as though some invisible sorcerer had been conjuring them all inside ourselves—sucking them away from the planets, away from the outside world, away from our own warm flesh and blood, down into the shadowy realm of thoughts and feelings. There they still repose; astrology has changed to astronomy; alchemy to chemistry; today the cold stars glitter unapproachable overhead, and with a naïve detachment mind watches matter moving incomprehensibly in the void. At last, after four centuries, thought has shaken herself free.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“This great inner world of consciousness, we may suppose, which each individual was now felt to control in some measure for himself, was a thing to fear as well as to respect. It gave to every single soul almost infinite potentialities, for evil as well as good; and even the wisest heads seem to have felt that civilization could only be held together as long as all these souls maintained a certain uniformity of pattern.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor and interpreter, Galen.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“it is still rare to find a philosopher or a psychologist who fully comprehends that he is consuming the fruits of this long, agonizing struggle to state the exact relation between spirit and matter, every time he uses such key-words of thought as absolute, actual, attribute, cause, concept, deduction, essence, existence, intellect, intelligence, intention, intuition, motive, potential, predicate, substance, tendency, transcend; abstract and concrete, entity and identity, matter and form, quality and quantity, objective and subjective, real and ideal, general, special and species, particular, individual, and universal.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words

“Agriculture and war, we feel, were the primary businesses of life, and it was to these that the Roman mind instinctively flew when it was casting about for some means of expressing a new abstract idea—of realizing the unknown in terms of the known. Not often could the warlike city afford to beat her swords into ploughshares, but she was constantly melting both implements into ideas.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words