"When by the discipline of His Divine guidance,
we know Him,
and He going with us
gives us Rest,
then Time and Eternity are merged
and lost
in that amazing vital relationship.
The union is one not of mystic contemplation,
but of intense perfection of activity,
not the Rest of the placid peace of stagnation,
but the Rest of perfect motion..."
"I have been so young till this moment that all my life now seems to have been a kind of sleep. I have thought that I was being carried, and behold, I was walking."
Ransom asked what she meant.
"What you have made me see," answered the Lady, "is as plain as the sky, but I never saw it before. Yet it has happened every day. One goes into the forest to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown up in one's mind. Then, it may be, one finds a different fruit and not the fruit one thought of. One joy was expected and another is given.
But this I had never noticed before--that the very moment of the finding there is in the mind a kind of thrusting back, or setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still, for a moment, before you.
And if you wished--if it were possible to wish--you could keep it there. You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other."
- from Perelandra, Chapter Five, by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
"...the monarch of mountains;
They crown'd him long ago
On a throne of rocks, in a robe of clouds,
With a diadem of snow."
-Lord Byron, Manfred, Act I, scene 1, line 62
"Sometimes you stumble across a few chords that put you in a reflective place. "
"...Yet mental images play an important part in my prayers....
But they seem to help me most when they are most fugitive
and fragmentary—rising and bursting like bubbles in champagne or
wheeling like rooks in a windy sky: contradicting one another (in logic) as the
crowded metaphors of a swift poet may do.
Fix on any one, and it goes dead.
You must do as Blake would do with a joy; kiss it as it flies...."
- from Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, page 86, by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
"Today’s tangents
will become tomorrow’s arcs,
and unforeseen connections
will tie up your loose ends in a way
that will make you want to slap your head and
holler at your accidental
brilliance."
- Chris Baty
"Nothing is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is the beginning of things longer."
