Owen Barfield Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Owen Barfield's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Philosopher Owen Barfield's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 4 quotes on this page collected since November 9, 1898! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
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  • ...the poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.

    Owen Barfield (1973). “Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning”, p.158, Wesleyan University Press
  • By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature--for instance in a biological survey of evolution--we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.

  • The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.

    Sight   Lost   Obvious  
  • When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis.

    Owen Barfield, Jeanne Clayton Hunter, Thomas Kranidas (1993). “A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction By Owen Barfield”, p.152, SUNY Press
  • And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?

    Owen Barfield (1973). “Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning”, p.67, Wesleyan University Press
  • When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

  • In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty.

    Life   Attitude   Sleep  
  • 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 (1954). “History in English Words by Owen Barfield”
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