I love this history quote from C.S. Lewis in The Screwtape Letters: “And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.”
What wisdom caught your attention this week?
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What strikes me is the humility this requires. Every generation tends to think it sees more clearly than those who came before, yet we have blind spots precisely because we are shaped by our own time. There is wisdom in listening across the generations—not merely to preserve the past, but to let truths we may have neglected expose the errors we have learned to accept as normal. “Ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee” (Deuteronomy 32:7).
Also from C.S. Lewis: When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.
I like that. This one caught my attention this week: “You should make your choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity, taking the entire burden of responsibility for how the human race behaves.” – At the Existentialist Café. Apparently a paraphrase from philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
That is an intense one!
Absolutely! I’ve been thinking about it since I read it.
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