"The Scent of a Flower We Have Not Found"

We [have] a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it… Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter… [But the things] in which we thought the beauty was located … are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited… Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And yet it is a remarkable thing that such philosophies … themselves bear reluctant witness to the truth that our real goal is elsewhere.- C.S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory"