It Is Our Nature - A Quotation from C.S. Lewis

Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice… If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.’ Life, in other words, has never been ‘normal’, and even those periods of history that we imagine to have been so show themselves, on closer inspection, to have been full of alarms of their own. ‘Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right.  Our species distinguishes itself by ignoring those plausible reasons. The insects have chosen their way, and have their rewards but it is not our way. ‘Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache. It is our nature.

C.S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 - 22 November 1963) wis a Breetish novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, leeterar creetic, essayist, lay theologian, broadcaster, lecturer, an Christian apologist.