Quotes by Type Fours

A Batch of Quotes to be sorted later, all from
Chapter 10 -- Type four: The Individualist of The Wisdom of The Enneagram by Riso and Hudson

"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.  All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up."  ~ James Baldwin

"After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent."  ~ Albert Camus

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."  ~ Marcel Proust

"It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures." ~  William Hazlitt

"It takes a genius to whine appealingly."  ~  F. Scott Fitzgerald

C.S. Lewis on Longing for Fulness of Being

What more, you may ask, do we want?  Ah, but we want so much more -- something the books on aesthetics take little notice of.  But the poets and the mythologies know all about it.  We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough.  We want something else which can hardly be put into words -- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves -- that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image.  That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods.  They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can't.  They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into a human face; but it won't.  Or not yet.  For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. 

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door.  We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure.  We cannot mingle with the splendors we see.  But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.  Some day, God willing, we shall get in.  When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed in Nature.  Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her.  When all the suns and nebula have passed away, each on e of you will still be alive.  Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it it the symbol Scripture invites me to use.  We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.

~ C. S. Lewis
(found in Maginificat, Vol. 15, No. 9, for Monday, November 18, 2013)