University Spokesman

If a man walking after wind and falsehood
Had told lies and said,
'I will speak out to you concerning wine and liquor,'
He would be spokesman to this people.

—Micah 2:11

On Stories in Film

The maker of the film version, however, apparently thought this tame. He substituted a subterranean volcanic eruption, and then went one better by adding an earthquake. Perhaps we should not blame him. Perhaps the original was not 'cinematic'.... But it would have been better not to have chosen in the first place a story which could be adapted to the screen only by being ruined.... There must be a pleasure in such stories distinct from mere excitement.

—C.S. Lewis, On seeing a film version of King Solomon's Mines

Nothing is more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction. The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world. There is death in the camera.

—C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: On Stories p17.

On Stories

"In life and art both, as it seems to me, we are always trying to catch in our net of successive moments something that is not successive. Whether in real life there is any doctor who can teach us how to do it, so that at last either the meshes will become fine enough to hold the bird, or we be so changed that we can throw our nets away and follow the bird to its own country," I cannot say. But I think it is sometimes done in stories.

—C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds: Fairy Stories p20.

Little to be Said

Of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends; as works fair and wonderful, while still they endure for eyes to see, are their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken for ever do they pass into song.

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, Of the Sindar.

Loneliness

Now it is Loneliness who comes at night
Instead of Sleep, to sit beside my bed.
Like a tired child I lie and wait her tread,
I watch her softly blowing out the light.
Motionless sitting, neither left or right
She turns, and weary, weary droops her head.
She, too, is old; she, too, has fought the fight.
So, with the laurel she is garlanded.

Through the sad dark the slowly ebbing tide
Breaks on a barren shore, unsatisfied.
A strange wind flows... then silence. I am fain
To turn to Loneliness, to take her hand,
Cling to her, waiting, till the barren land
Fills with the dreadful monotone of rain.

—Katherine Mansfield, Loneliness.

Engineering Ethics

Contemporary duty ethicists recognize that many moral dilemmas are resolvable only by recognizing some valid exceptions to simple principles of duty.

—Introduction to Engineering Ethics p 54.

We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centered on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly.

—C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

What is important?

One never forgets what is important. I learned that only later, when I was somewhat older. Nothing secondary remains—it gets thrown away along with one's dreams.

—Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway).

I wish you'd stop quoting!

"Mrs. Who, I wish you'd stop quoting!" Charles Wallace sounded very annoyed.

"But she finds it so difficult to verbalize, Charles dear. It helps her if she can quote instead of working out words of her own."

—Madeline L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time p28.

The Tempest

Me, poor man!—my library was dukedom large enough.

—Prospero, in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act I Scene II.

Calvin's Institutes I

Shall we, indeed, distinguish between right and wrong by that judgment which has been imparted to us, yet will there be no judge in heaven? Will there remain for us even in sleep some remnant of intelligence, yet will no God keep watch in governing the world? Shall we think ourselves the inventors of so many arts and useful things that God may be defrauded of his praise?

—John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion I. v. 5.