Forrest Gaffney > Forrest's Quotes

“Fairy tales and folk tales are for children and childlike people, not because they are little and inconsequential, but because they are as enormous as life itself.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“Man is not only that creature that forges tools, that reasons, and that walks upright. Man is the creature that looks up. Man praises.”
― Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

“Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, The Odyssey because all life is a journey, The Book of Job because all life is a riddle.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”
― G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“Even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.”
― G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“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 now feels not like going, but like going back.”
― C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“But, said Lewis, myths are lies, even though lies breathed through silver.

No, said Tolkien, they are not.

...just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.

We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.

You mean, asked Lewis, that the story of Christ is simply a true myth, a myth that works on us in the same way as the others, but a myth that really happened? In that case, he said, I begin to understand.”
― Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

“You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.”
― Humphrey Carpenter, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography

“Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

“Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done.”
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

“Well, if I am not drunk, I am mad," replied Syme with perfect calm; "but I trust I can behave like a gentleman in either condition.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation, and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one. That is why, in spite of a hundred disadvantages, the world will always return to monogamy.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.”
― G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“There are degrees of seriousness," replied Syme. "I have never doubted that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what you said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men up to a neglected truth.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“It is said by the Eldar that in water there lives yet the echo of the Music of the Ainur more than in any substance that is in this Earth; and many of the Children of Ilúvatar hearken still unsated to the voices of the Sea, and yet know not for what they listen.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.”
― Ann Voskamp, One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

“What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“She was not in the least afraid of loneliness, because she was not afraid of devils. I think they were afraid of her.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross

“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

“And he set to rhyme his ale-measures,
And he sang aloud his laws,
Because of the joy of giants,
The joy without a cause.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

“I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Ballad of the White Horse

“Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday