Quotes of Day: On Fame and Intolerance

“We are told that nothing so much beguiles those who have some natural excellence but are not yet perfected in virtue as the desire for fame.  It is a maxim from the Agricola of Tacitus; it will later blossom into Milton’s line about “that last infirmity of the noble mind.”  
CS Lewis The Discarded Image


“One sad result of making English Literature a ‘subject’ at schools and universities is that the reading of great authors is, from early years, stamped upon the minds of conscientious and submissive young people as something meritorious. When the young person in question is an agnostic whose ancestors were Puritans, you get a very regrettable state of mind. The Puritan conscience works on without the Puritan theology–like millstones grinding nothing; like digestive juices working on an empty stomach and producing ulcers. The unhappy youth applies to literature all the scruples, the rigorism, the self-examination, the distrust of pleasure, which his forebears applied to the spiritual life; and perhaps soon all the intolerance and self-righteousness.” 
CS Lewis An Experiment in Criticism