Waking Up
"A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean...
...The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself."
- George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination
Eternal Beauty and Wisdom
"[An artist] should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom."
- C.S. Lewis, Christianity and Literature
Handfuls of Sparkling Water
"I felt... as if I had been down like a little child to the sea, and I had stooped to the wave and filled my palms as well as I could with the sparkling water, but as I have been coming to bring it to you, it has nearly all trickled away, for I am not able to hold it by reason of my leaking hands. Yet, for all that, the little I can bring will make you, I hope, rejoice in the great eternal ocean from which it was taken..."
- Charles Spurgeon
Light and High Beauty
"Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West, the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end, the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was Light and high Beauty forever beyond its reach."
- J.R.R. Tolkien, Return of the King
