Scatter of Quotes

 "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."  -Howard Thurman

 HT Conversion Diary 


 Mythopoeia by JRR Tolkien

The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

and then, from On Fairy Stories:

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it. If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: “inner consistency of reality,” it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the work does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ”joy” in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a “consolation” for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, “Is it true?” The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): “If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world.” That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the “eucatastrophe” we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world. The use of this word gives a hint of my epilogue. It is a serious and dangerous matter. It is presumptuous of me to touch upon such a theme; but if by grace what I say has in any respect any validity, it is, of course, only one facet of a truth incalculably rich: finite only because the capacity of Man for whom this was done is finite.

Finally, a lecture about Edith Stein which reminds me that this bit is why Liam originally gave me the Phenomenology lectures to read -- we were discussing something like this, especially the second part:

Philosophers of science investigate the thinking -- the logical inferences -- that turn raw data into accepted statements of fact. They ask how data get to be "data" in the first place. Some scientists, and most of the general public, assume that the data are just "caused" by the experiments, and that a good scientist merely reports findings without adding any "interpretation." They assume that anything "added" by the scientist would introduce bias, and would spoil the possibility of other scientists' getting identical results from running the same experiment. Science is supposed to be "impersonal." By contrast, the humanities are supposed to focus on distinctive personal and cultural factors.