Wyndham Lewis Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“There is nothing contemptible about an intoxicated man - if it is nothing more than a bookful of words or a roomful of notes that he has got drunk on.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage - that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Dying for an idea,' again, sounds well enough, but why not let the idea die instead of you?”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman's industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“The male has been persuaded to assume a certain onerous and disagreeable role with the promise of rewards -- material and psychological. Women may in the first place even have put it into his head. BE A MAN! may have been, metaphorically, what Eve uttered at the critical moment in the garden of Eden.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“So-called austerity, the stoic injunction, is the path towards universal destruction. It is the old, the fatal, competitive path. Pull in your belt is a slogan closely related to gird up your loins, or the guns-butter metaphor.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weakness of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“In a period of such obsessing political controversy as the present, I believe that I am that strange animal, the individual without any politics at all.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“(Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness . . . a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“What every artist should try to prevent is the car, in which is our civilized life, plunging over the side of the precipice -- the exhibitionist extremist promoter driving the whole bag of tricks into a nihilistic nothingness or zero.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“To begin with, I hold that there is never an end; everything of which our life is composed, pictures and books as much as anything else, is a means only, in the sense that the work of art exists in the body of the movement of life. It may be a strong factor of progress and direction, but we cannot say that it is the end or reason of things, for it is so much implicated with them ; and when we are speaking of art we suddenly find that we are talking of life all the time.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: he is the mind imagining, not the executant.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“In life nothing is taken to its ultimate conclusion, life is a half-way house, a place of obligatory compromise; and, in dealing in logical conclusions, a man steps out of life -- or so it would be quite legitimate to argue.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Sex is of the same clay as Time! -- of the same clay Since both are in their essence but One-Way Time is the one-way dimension: sex its tart And subtle biological counterpart.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“The Future is distant, like the Past, and therefore sentimental. The mere element "Past" must be retained to sponge up and absorb our melancholy. Everything absent, remote, requiring projection in the veiled weakness of the mind, is sentimental.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“To be a satirist, at all events. The venom of Pope is what is needed. The sense of delight -- the expansion and the compassion of Shakespeare is no good at all for that. He is a bad comic.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“All orthodox opinion - that is, today, "revolutionary" opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man.”
-- Wyndham Lewis -
“Prostration is our natural position. A worm-like movement from a spot of sunlight to a spot of shade, and back, is the type of movement that is natural to men.”
-- Wyndham Lewis
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