Top 60 Philip Zaleski Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Resignation is the better part of wisdom.”

— Philip Zaleski

2. “The idyll ended, as idylls must.”

— Philip Zaleski

3. “Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.”

— Philip Zaleski

4. “Fidelity in marriage requires self-will and self-denial.”

— Philip Zaleski

5. “The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals.”

— Philip Zaleski

6. “Obedience appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace.”

— Philip Zaleski

7. “The author observes of the Inklings, “they make a perfect compass rose of faith: talking the Catholic, Lewis the “mere Christian,” Williams the Anglican, Barfield the esotericist.”

— Philip Zaleski

8. “The artist became a subcreator.”

— Philip Zaleski

9. “The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.”

— Philip Zaleski

10. “Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.”

— Philip Zaleski

11. “All images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in a last resort, “It is not high. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?” CS Lewis.”

— Philip Zaleski

12. “Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.”

— Philip Zaleski

13. “A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.”

— Philip Zaleski

14. “A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.”

— Philip Zaleski

15. “Tolkien regretted “the degeneration of real curiosity and enthusiasm,” and called for research motivated by love of knowledge rather than hunger for a job.”

— Philip Zaleski

16. “Williams was complex and tortured. He was not a saint but had his saintly side, which came and went, radiant and sincere as long as it lasted.”

— Philip Zaleski

17. “Even while an atheist, he held some things sacred.”

— Philip Zaleski

18. “Oxford in the Inklings’ day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one’s surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.”

— Philip Zaleski

19. “Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind.”

— Philip Zaleski

20. “As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis’s increased command over over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense.”

— Philip Zaleski

21. “The authors disclose that in less than a century the word “tension” grew from signifying a literal electric charge to a metaphor for emotional stress between two people. Writes Owen Barfield, “The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.”

— Philip Zaleski

22. “Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in the turbulent waters of restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.”

— Philip Zaleski

23. “And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to “cellar door”: “Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me – ‘cellar door,’ say. From that, I might think of a name, ‘Selador,’ and from that a character, a situation begins to grow.”

— Philip Zaleski

24. “The arts are the best Time Machine we have.” C. S. Lewis.”

— Philip Zaleski

25. “Recovery is the ability to see things with clarity, “freed from the drab blur of greatness or familiarity – from possessiveness.”

— Philip Zaleski

26. “Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission.”

— Philip Zaleski

27. “In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry. – Owen Barfield.”

— Philip Zaleski

28. “I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: “Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.” And they cried out in a great voice: “He made us.” CS Lewis.”

— Philip Zaleski

29. “Lewis spoke for almost every member when he said, “There is no sound I like better than adult male laughter.”

— Philip Zaleski

30. “The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God’s grace.”

— Philip Zaleski

31. “Christians who like to write might do as a description of the genus. But the actual species shared more precise characteristics, including intellectual vivacity, love of death, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.”

— Philip Zaleski

32. “A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.”

— Philip Zaleski

33. “A very small class of books have nothing in common say that each admits us to a world of its own that seems to have been going on before we stumbled into it, but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.”

— Philip Zaleski

34. “Barfield understood his epochal experience are not as a rebound from love sickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness.”

— Philip Zaleski

35. “He trusted the cosmos – but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.”

— Philip Zaleski

36. “The longing for Joy is in itself Joy. When he recalled when he had experienced Joy, he was, in that recollection, experiencing Joy anew, though he knew it not. Joy was not a state; it was an arrow pointing to something beyond all states, something objective yet unattainable – at least in our earthly existence.”

— Philip Zaleski

37. “Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.”

— Philip Zaleski

38. “Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit.”

— Philip Zaleski

39. “A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.”

— Philip Zaleski

40. “Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly.”

— Philip Zaleski

41. “She was simpler, less fractured by life during her youth.”

— Philip Zaleski

42. “As the honors accrued, creativity diminished.”

— Philip Zaleski

43. “One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.”

— Philip Zaleski

44. “After reading binge prompted by convalescence, “As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace.”

— Philip Zaleski

45. “He had found his vocation: to fight the Lord’s battles in the Academy and the world at large.”

— Philip Zaleski

46. “Now a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant him during “the fussy, time-wasting, botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing,” and, worst of all, the hymns and organ music.”

— Philip Zaleski

47. “She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion.”

— Philip Zaleski

48. “Facts seemed to run around and rattle in his head like dried peas, and then suddenly to form a convincing pattern.”

— Philip Zaleski

49. “He called himself Jack, a plain handshake of a name, a far cry from the Clive Staples he had been christened, and to be Jack was the hard work of a lifetime.”

— Philip Zaleski

50. “Like all great readers, he could create for himself a “wall of stillness”.”

— Philip Zaleski