Cecil Lewis > Quotes

“The most self confident aces began to wonder when their turn would come.. Faced by the empty chairs of men you had laughed and joked with at lunch. And, miraculously, you were still there. Until tomorrow..”
― Cecil Lewis

“This was Liberty! This was Freedom! These beautiful words are the names men give to fond illusions; for they are inevitably bound to their fellow men, to those who depend on them and on whom they depend. Autocracies bind them by rules imposed from above, democracies and fraternities by rules imposed from within.”
― Cecil Lewis, Pathfinders

“There are fortunate men to whom life is a continuous developing pattern, whose education leads them on to a career that carries them, almost in spite of themselves, to a place in the world from which, as their powers desert them, they withdraw to ease and seclusion, and whose final demise is as quiet and completing as the full stop at the end of a long and well-constructed sentence. None of these lives has been mine.”
― Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising

“The white floor, several thousand feet below, rose up towards me, turned at last from a pavement of pearl to just a plain bank of fog. I plunged into it. I might be going back from paradise to purgatory, so grey and cold and comfortless it was. And as I sand through it, listening to the singing of the wires, I was thinking how some day men might no longer hug the earth, but dwell in heaven, draw power and sustenance from the skies, whirl at their will among the stars, and only seek the ground as men go down to the dark mysteries of the sea-floor, glad to return, sun-worshipers, up to the stainless heaven.”
― Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising

“It was true that war settled nothing permanently, that the seeds of the next war rose from the blood of the last, yet in the choice of the two ways of life, the democratic way, with all its shortcomings, was so immeasurably nobler in ideal – and in past record – that it was worth trying to preserve.”
― Cecil Lewis, Pathfinders

“The truth was that this persecution was too vast for the mind to grasp. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, all with their lives, their families, their properties, their businesses; all with their hopes and plans, had been brutally ripped out of the fabric of society. The people were innocent. Quite innocent. How could they help their blood? What had they done? No, the imagination gaped at it. The mind froze with horror, turned aside, gave up.”
― Cecil Lewis, Pathfinders

“Arm in arm, we trailed off through the dripping grass. We were tired and silent. One of us would frame a thought, a phrase, a comment, and the other would grunt, nod, or laugh. Not what is said enriches the heart. A phrase may remain embedded in the mind like a dagger or diamond; but memory is a subtler synthesis - a tone of voice, a turn of the head, a pause, a blade of grass that the feet brush aside, a glance, the first lark arising, stillness, some aspect of the skies . . . This is the argosy of friends.”
― Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising

“the rational solution, as yet unsupported by the emotional drive which would make it a common faith, a cardinal necessity not to be denied, drifts in the doldrums, while the hysterical crew wring their hands and pray for a fair wind, instead of manning the boats and rowing the ship out to the Trades.”
― Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising

“Yet which is more civilized? To use gunpowder for crackers, or for murder? To listen to the radio, or take your pet thrush out under the willows by the water that it may be happy and you may hear it sing? To rush about madly over the face of the earth in car or aeroplane seeing nothing, or to spend hours in the contemplation of a single flower? We should have little difficulty in choosing, I think, if the general fever to “ do ” something, to “ save time,” did not possess us. (And what will you do with the time when you have saved it ? ask the Chinese.)”
― Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising

“Words are like sweets; too many of them make you sick.”
― Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising

“And hosts of other memories would have followed, crowding: a thousand skyscapes, day and night, the gay or sombre garments of the blue; the way the earth looked, falling; the wonder at first coming out above the clouds; the rush of engines starting; swallowing to stop deafness in a dive; the scream of wires; shadows of clouds on hills; rain, sweeping like veils over the sea, far off; sunlight; stars between wings; friends, close in formation, swaying, hand on throttle, as they rode ten feet away a mile above the earth. And many others: grass blown down when engines were run up; the smell of dope, and castor oil, and varnish in new cockpits; moonlight shining on struts; sunset clouds, gold-braided; the gasp before the dive; machine-guns; chasing wild duck; the feel of bumps, and all the mastery over movement, pride in skill.”
― Cecil Lewis, Sagittarius Rising