Owen Barfield Quotes

9 Sourced Quotes

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

Owen Barfield
It was not simply a new theory of the nature of the celestial movements that was feared, but a new theory of the nature of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth.

Owen Barfield
And what is the very essence of poetry if it is not this 'metaphorical language'-this marking of the before unapprehended relations of things?

Owen Barfield
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
The poet, while creating anew, is likely to be in a sense restoring something old.

Owen Barfield
Imagination is really thinking with a bit of will in it.

Owen Barfield
"hypotheses" in the strict sense of the word, that is, [are] assumptions made for the purpose of a particular argument and by the same token not posited as true.

Owen Barfield
By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature--for instance in a biological survey of evolution--we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.

Owen Barfield
And common sense today assumes that it is the outer world that is real and permanent, while the inner experience we call consciousness, or subjectivity, or our own or our self, is a fleeting unreality to which it somehow gives birth from time to time.

Owen Barfield