“Of all devices for dragooning the human spirit, the least clumsy is to procure its abortion in the womb of language; and we should recognize, I think, that those—and their number is increasing—who are driven by an impulse to reduce the specifically human to a mechanical or animal regularity, will continue to be increasingly irritated by the nature of the mother tongue and make it their point of attack. The strategy is well advised. Language is the storehouse of imagination; it cannot continue to be itself without performing its function. But its function is, to mediate transition from the unindividualized, dreaming spirit that carried the infancy of the world to the individualized human spirit, which has the future in its charge. If therefore they succeed in expunging from language all the substance of its past, in which it is naturally so rich, and finally converting it into the species of algebra that is best adapted to the uses of indoctrination and empirical science, a long and important step forward will have been taken in the selfless cause of the liquidation of the human spirit.” —Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction 2nd Ed. p. 23
“Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature. Again, as long as it was treated as an amusement, the evil which it could do was limited in scope. But in an age when the connection between imagination and figuration is beginning to be dimly realized, when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and the evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited. We have seen in the Romantic movement an instance of the way in which the making of images may react upon the collective representations. It is a fairly rudimentary instance, but even so it has already gone beyond the dreams and responses of a leisured few. The economic and social structure of Switzerland is noticeably affected by its tourist industry, and that is due only in part to increased facilities of travel. It is due not less to the condition that (whatever may be said about their ‘particles’) the mountains which twentieth-century man sees are not the mountains which eighteenth-century man saw.
It may be objected that this is a very small matter, and that it will be a long time before the imagination of man substantially alters those appearances of nature with which his figuration supplies him. But then I am taking the long view. Even so, we need not be too confident. Even if the pace of change remained the same, one who is really sensitive to (for example) the difference between the medieval collective representations and our own will be aware that, without traveling any greater distance than we have come since the fourteenth century, we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. But the pace of change has not remained the same. It has accelerated and is accelerating.
We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motorbicycle substituted for her left breast.” ― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances
“The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.” ― Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart
“When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis.” ― Owen Barfield, Night Operation
“We can only cope with the dangers of language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous.” ― Owen Barfield, History in English Words
“All conscious nature has experiences of pleasure and pain. Man alone can deliberately will the repetition of an experience. And repetition, experienced as such, is at the heart, for good and evil, of his faculty of reasoning, and thus makes possible his language, his art, his morality, and indeed his humanity. Yet it is the enemy of life, for repetition is itself the principle, not of life but of mechanism.” ― Owen Barfield, Orpheus: A Poetic Drama
“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, History in English Words
“…library terror - that feeling of being hopelessly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of available books…” ― Owen Barfield, Night Operation
“I believe I have already suggested that colour is the most obvious bridge between emotion and perception, that is, between subjective experience of the psyche and quality objective in nature. Both light up only between the extremes of light and darkness, and in their reciprocal interplay. Thus, outward the rainbow–or, if you prefer it, the spectrum–is the bridge between dark and light, but inwardly the rainbow is, what the soul itself is, the bridge between body and spirit, between earth and heaven.” ― Owen Barfield
“True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment, and we can only learn to view anything with detachment by comparing it with other things which are both like and unlike it. We cannot understand the present without a knowledge of the past, our native land without having spent some time in a foreign country, our mother-tongue without a working knowledge of at least two other languages. Without such knowledge, our love of ourselves at the present moment, of our country, of our language, remains an ignorant idolatry, exemplified by the Frenchman who said: “The great advantage of the French language is that in it the words occur in the order in which one thinks them.” In” ― Owen Barfield, History in English Words
“If people say the world we perceive is a ‘construct’ of our brains, they are saying in effect, that it results from an inveterate habit of thought. Why does it never occur to them that a habit is something you can overcome, if you set about it with enough energy?” ― Owen Barfield
“When a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it.” ― Owen Barfield, History in English Words
“True understanding is unattainable without both love and detachment,” ― Owen Barfield, History in English Words
“Therefore it is only people living in the same period and, broadly speaking, in the same community, who inhabit the same world. People living in other periods, or even at the same period but in a totally different community, do not inhabit the same world about which they have different ideas, they inhabit different worlds altogether.” ― Owen Barfield
“When we recall the great influence which Spenser’s poetry has exerted on English poets who have lived and written since his day, we can clearly see how the two kinds of Platonism - a direct Platonism, and a Platonism long ago transmuted and worked right down into the emotions of common people by the passionate Christianity of the Dark and Middle Ages - combined to beget the infinite suggestiveness which is now contained in such words as ‘love’ and ‘beauty’. Let us remember, then, that every time we abuse these terms, or use them too lightly, we are draining them of their power; every time a society journalist or a film producer exploits this vast suggestiveness to tickle a vanity or dignify a lust, he is squandering a great pile of spiritual capital which has been laid up by centuries of weary effort.” ― Owen Barfield, History in English Words
“Before the scientific revolution, [man] did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to quite the same extent that we do. He was integrated, or mortised into it, each different part of him being united to a different part of it by some invisible thread. In his relation to his environment, the man of the middle ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo.” ― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry
“As we see it, the whole outlook brought about by the scientific revolution should have been–must be–a phase, only, of the evolution of consciousness. An absolutely indispensable phase, but a passing one. What is riveting it on to us and preventing us from superseding it, because it prevents us from even imaging any other kind of consciousness, is precisely this error of projecting it back into the past.” ― Owen Barfield, Worlds Apart
“If I find it depressing when a distinguished literary critic complains that ‘Coleridge has little insight into the incompatibility of different trends of thought,’ it is because this seems to me to betray a deplorable inability to distinguish between philosophy and talking about philosophy.” —Owen Barfield, How Coleridge Thought p. 7
“The intensities must be at once opposite and equal. As the liberty, so must be the reverence for law. As the independence, so must be the service and submission to the Supreme Will.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Nature of Life found in Owen Barfield, How Coleridge Thought p. 9