Marvels

"The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to …

A Road Out of the Self

“I thus understood that in deepest solitude there is a road right out of the self, a commerce with something which, by refusing to identify itself with any object of the senses, or anything whereof we have biological or social need, or anything imagined, or any state of our own minds, proclaims itself sheerly objective. …

The Longing

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it …

Pure Love Lives by Faith

But pure love lives by faith. It loves the vaguely beheld and unrealized ideal. It dares believe that the loved is not all that she ever seemed. It is in virtue of this that love loves on. George MacDonald

Being Such

"Does she never try to teach them any thing, Ethel?" "She is constantly teaching them, whether she tries or not," I answered. "If you can make any one believe that there is something somewhere to be trusted, is not that the best lesson you can give him? That can be taught only by being such …

By All Your Actions

TO MISS GLADDING 59 Magdalen College, Oxford. June 7th 1945 Dear Miss Gladding I am afraid I don’t know any books more elementary than my own wh. wd. help. The truth is that when a person (not herself v. bookish or philosophical) has lost faith under so v. great and bewildering a trial, no intellectual …

A Kind of Happiness

"There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes." — C.S. Lewis

Free the Mind

In the midst of prosperity the mind is elated; and in prosperity a man forgets himself. In hardship, he is forced to reflect on himself; even though he be unwilling. – King Alfred

The Thought of a Thinker

The letters he has left behind him, have waked but poor ideas in poor minds; for words, if they seem to mean anything, must always seem to mean something within the scope of the mind hearing them. Words cannot convey the thought of a thinker to a no-thinker; of a largely aspiring and self-discontented soul, …

Thou

Thou art my knowledge and my memory, No less than my real, deeper life, my love. I will not fool, degrade myself to trust In less than that which maketh me say Me, In less than that causing itself to be. Then art within me, behind, beneath, above— I will be thine because I may …