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Lewis Quotes

Browse 10 quotes about Lewis.

Lewis Quotes

“The use of fashions in thought is to distract men from their real dangers. We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is in the least danger, and fix its approval on the virtue that is nearest the vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running around with fire extinguishers whenever there’s a flood; and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gone under.”

ThoughtStaplesFashionsCliveLewisThe Screwtape LettersC SExtinguishers
Book:The Screwtape Letters
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“Earlier this year I visited the township of Bragar on the Isle of Lewis to research shielings. I was told the story of a local resident, Mr. Campbell, who lived through the end of transhumance on the island in the 1950s. Mr. Campbell readily recalled that the summers of his youth, spent at the family's àiridh on the Lewis moor, were the happiest time of his life; yet, when his family ceased to keep dairy cows on their croft, he refused to go out to the shieling any more: without the cows, what was the point? The essence of life at the shielings was gone.”

CattleDairy CowsLewisCroftingTranshumanceShielings
Book:Reforesting Scotland 72: Autumn/Winter 2025
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“An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.”

StoriesReadingSurpriseLiteraryRereadingLewisInklingsRe ReadingUnliterary
Book:On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
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“I notice that, in the lecture … which Prof. Lowry gave recently, in Paris … he brought forward certain freak formulae for tartaric acid, in which hydrogen figures as bigamist … I may say, he but follows the loose example set by certain Uesanians, especially one G. N. Lewis, a Californian thermodynamiter, who has chosen to disregard the fundamental canons of chemistry—for no obvious reason other than that of indulging in premature speculation upon electrons as the cause of valency…”

ScienceScientistParisChemistryHydrogenElectronsLectureLewisLowryG N Lewis G N LewisGilbert Newton LewisProf Lowry
Author:Henry Edward Armstrong
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“And have you no music, no singing, no dancing now at your marriages?' 'May the Possessor keep you! I see that you are a stranger in Lewis, or you would not ask such a question,' the woman exclaimed with grief and surprise in her tone. 'It is long since we abandoned those foolish ways in Ness, and, indeed, throughout Lewis. In my young days there was hardly a house in Ness in which there was not one or two or three who could play the pipe, or the fiddle, or the trump. And I have heard it said that there were men, and women too, who could play things they called harps, and lyres, and bellow-pipes, but I do not know what these things were.' 'And why were those discontinued?' 'A blessed change came over the place and the people,' the woman replied in earnestness, 'and the good men and the good ministers who arose did away with the songs and the stories, the music and the dancing, the sports and the games, that were perverting the minds and ruining the souls of the people, leading them to folly and stumbling.' 'But how did the people themselves come to discard their sports and pastimes?' 'Oh, the good ministers and the good elders preached against them and went among the people, and besought them to forsake their follies and to return to wisdom. They made the people break and burn their pipes and fiddles.”

LewisGaelic Culture
Book:Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations
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