Scripture speaks through parable. Poets speak through image. Stories reveal what argument cannot. Language has always carried meaning through more than explanation alone.
He did not say anything to them without using a parable.
Matthew 13:34
I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter hidden things, things from of old.
Psalm 78:2
The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
Psalm 19:1
Deep calls to deep.
Psalm 42:7
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.
Psalm 119:105
For now we see through a glass, darkly.
1 Corinthians 13:12
He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Matthew 13:9
Where there is no vision, the people perish.
Proverbs 29:18
Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
C. S. Lewis
We do not want merely to see beauty… we want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see.
C. S. Lewis
A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
C. S. Lewis
The Lord of the Rings · On Fairy-Stories
Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made.
J. R. R. Tolkien
We make still by the law in which we're made.
J. R. R. Tolkien
Not all those who wander are lost.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Mind of the Maker · Creed or Chaos
The dogma is the drama.
Dorothy L. Sayers
We may call Art the expression of man's delight in God's work.
Dorothy L. Sayers
The imagination is not a separate faculty of the mind, but the mind working at full strength.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Phantastes · The Princess and the Goblin
A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer the art, the more things it will mean.
George MacDonald
It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning.
George MacDonald
To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination.
George MacDonald
Four Quartets · Ash Wednesday
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot
The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678
This hill, though high, I covet to ascend; The difficulty will not me offend.
John Bunyan
Then I saw in my dream…
John Bunyan
Christianity is not in talk and profession, but in practice and reality.
John Bunyan
Orthodoxy · Heretics
The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.
G. K. Chesterton
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.
G. K. Chesterton
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
G. K. Chesterton