14 Quotes by Owen Barfield

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.