Owen Barfield Quotes

I am not given to superstition, yet there are certain places in old Asian countries where human beings have been born and have lived and died for so many generations that the very earth is saturated with their flesh and the air seems crowded with their continuing presence.

I write about modern people who share a deep sense of connection to the mysteries of the past. I find that I understand myself and my world better when I'm able to peer into history as a mirror.

The word of the oldest of the old of our peoples didn't stop. It spoke the truth, saying that our feet couldn't walk alone, that our history of pain and shame was repeated and multiplied in the flesh and blood of the brothers and sisters of other lands and skies.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

Let us not suffer from a national amnesia that causes us to forget who and what we are.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

In a way, being born is a sort of ecological contagion. When you have longevity of family, we remember our grandfathers and maybe our great-grandfathers. We somehow don't have the capacity in modern life to remember further than that. All of the ramifications of their lives have an effect on us, and we're not aware of it.

The point of mythology or myth is to point to the horizon and to point back to ourselves: This is who we are; this is where we came from; and this is where we're going. And a lot of Western society over the last hundred years - the last 50 years really - has lost that. We have become rather aimless and wandering.

Traditions are the guideposts driven deep in our subconscious minds. The most powerful ones are those we can't even describe, aren't even aware of.

A society is defined as much by how it comes to terms with its past as by its attitude toward the future: its memories are no less revealing than its aims.

I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.

I carry the voices of all my family within me, and they were with me there in the jungle.

The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.

The great truths of human life do not spring new born to each new generation. They derive from long experience. They are the gathered wisdom of the race. They are renewed in time of conflict and danger.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

We should draw on our story, we should draw on our history. If we don't know who we are, if we don't know how we became what we are, we're going to start suffering from all the obvious detrimental effects of amnesia.

It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better.

Pay heed to the tales of old wives. It may well be that they alone keep in memory what it was once needful for the wise to know.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

Tradition is only democracy extended through time; it may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who are merely walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man's opinion, even if he is our father.

Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.