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Owen Barfield Quotes

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

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

Owen Barfield
Sight, Lost, Obvious

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.

Owen Barfield
Life, Attitude, Sleep

When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

Owen Barfield
Significant Change, Community, Shifting

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

Owen Barfield
Progress, Velocity, Increase
Owen Barfield, Jeanne Clayton Hunter, Thomas Kranidas (1993). “A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction By Owen Barfield”, p.152, SUNY Press

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
Reading, Character, Past
Owen Barfield (1954). “History in English Words by 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
Essence, Language, Relation
Owen Barfield (1973). “Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning”, p.67, Wesleyan University Press

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

Owen Barfield
Creating, Poet, Restoring
Owen Barfield (1973). “Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning”, p.158, Wesleyan University Press

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
Men, Historical, Would Be

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