“In the second half of A Preface to Paradise Lost, [C.S.] Lewis defended his approach to literary criticism and the artistry of Milton against the recent trend in literary theory represented by I.A. Richards, D.G. James, and T.S. Eliot. His opponents deplored the stock responses to moral questions they found in Paradise Lost. Lewis countered that society would do well to recover Milton's stock responses to pride, treachery, pain, and death.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“If your mother says she loves you, check it out. That’s what the old cigar-chewing night editors in the city room used to say when I was a cub.”
[My bibliographic note to myself for this one is “Evers MW” but there’s no such entry in my actual bibliographic file for any book I’ve read so I have no idea what it means. The sentiment is in any case widespread regarding old-time journalism.]
“To have no philosophy is to have a bad philosophy.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [quoting a letter around Christmas 1928 to his brother Warren (“Warnie”) in China in which Lewis insisted that the line was original with him].
“It was not the use of science that bothered [C.S.] Lewis but its misuse. The danger lay not with the sciences but with the humanities, which had fallen to pieces after World War I and abandoned their function in preserving the concepts of right, wrong, true, false, and beautiful. Poetry no longer made sense, music no longer had melodies, novels no longer had plots, paintings no longer were pictures, and the vast public ceased to be interested in the arts.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“Idealist: a cynic in the making.”
“Irving Layton Canadian poet (1912-2006)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail June 19, 2013
“Great players may question one of their moves, but they never question themselves.”
Bruce Pandolfini in National Post April 24, 1999 [discussing chess]
“That religion which God requires, and will accept, does not consist in weak, dull, lifeless wishes, raising us but a little above a state of indifference. God in His Word, greatly insists upon it, that we be in good earnest, fervent in spirit, and our hearts vigorously engaged in mercies.”
Jonathan Edwards quoted in Federalist Patriot No. 04-32 August 9, 2004 from Federalist.com.
“Ambrose Bierce wrote of an inventor who built a moon rocket. When he fired it up, it bored straight down into the earth. A while later he crawled up out of the hole, and triumphantly announced, ‘My invention has proved correct in all its details; the defects are merely basic and fundamental!’ … whereupon the investors rushed forward to press money on him for the next attempt.”
Spider Robinson in Globe & Mail April 27, 1999