Reading and thinking: two quotes
August 31, 2006
One of the few devotional periodicals worth reading is Tabletalk from Ligonier Ministries. This month’s issue is about “Proud Mediocrity: Facing the addiction of our culture.” But never mind. All I want to do is to pass on a couple of striking (to me, for obvious reasons,) quotations to those who collect such things.
The majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternate pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called readiing oneself to sleep. …but literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. –C.S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism
And then there was this gem from the acerbic pen of G.K. Chesterton:
The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the coming of the marvels of technology, the establishment of universal education, and all the enlightenment of the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking.
Dave, hanging on by a thread.
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I’m very familiar with C.S. Lewis but G.K. Chesterton not so much. Didn’t he write both theology and good fiction too?
Try this link:
http://www.chesterton.org/discover/who.html
He’s well worth reading.