Wyndham Lewis Quotes

Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.

Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.

You're a terrible feller," said Butcher. "If you had your way, you'd leave us stark naked. We should all be standing on our little island in the savage state of the Ancient Britons; figuratively." He hiccuped. "Yes, figuratively. But in reality the country would be armed better than it ever had been before. And by the sacrifice of these famous 'national characteristics' we cling to sentimentally, and which are merely the accident of a time, we should lay a soil and foundation of unspecific force on which new and realler 'national flavours' would very soon sprout." "I quite agree," Butcher jerked out energetically. He ordered another Laager. "I agree with what you say. If we don't give up dreaming, we shall get spanked. I have given up my gypsies. That was very public-spirited of me?" He looked coaxingly. "If every one would give up their gypsies, their jokes and their gentlemen - . 'Gentlemen' are worse than gypsies.

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.

For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.

Dying for an idea,' again, sounds well enough, but why not let the idea die instead of you?

I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.

I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.

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.

We are against the glorification of "the People," as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren.

But let me have silence always, in the centre of the shouting - that is essential! Let me have silence so that no pin may drop and not be heard, and not a whisper escape us for all our spouting, nor the needle's scratching upon this gramophone of a circular cosmic spot. Hear me! Mark me! Learn me! Throw the mind's ear open - shut up the mind's eye - all will be music!

The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising
themselves.

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).

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.

Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.

Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.

Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.

Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.

Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.

Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine.

With most people, not describable as artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during their courtship. All their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man.

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?

Then we are assured by Sartre that owing to the final disappearance of God our liberty is absolute! At this the entire audience waves its hat or claps its hands. But this natural enthusiasm is turned abruptly into something much less buoyant when it is learnt that this liberty weighs us down immediately with tremendous responsibilities. We now have to take all God's worries on our shoulders -now that we are become men like gods. It is at this point that the Anxiety and Despondency begin, ending in utter despair.

Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.

The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.

Feminism was recognized by the average man as a conflict in which it was impossible for a man, as a chivalrous gentleman, as a respecter of the rights of little nations (like little Belgium), as a highly evolved citizen of a highly civilized community, to refuse the claim of this better half to self-determination.

In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of 'freedom', like a bastard brother of reform.

Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.

A hundred things are done today in the divine name of Youth, that if they showed their true colors would be seen by rights to belong rather to old age.

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.

If the world would only build temples to Machinery in the abstract then everything would be perfect. The painter and sculptor would have plenty to do, and could, in complete peace and suitably honored, pursue their trade without further trouble.

The intelligence suffers today automatically in consequence of the attack on all authority, advantage, or privilege. These things are not done away with, it is needless to say, but numerous scapegoats are made of the less politically powerful, to satisfy the egalitarian rage awakened.

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.

What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?

Then down came the lid
the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a "war to end war." But it merely ended art. It did not end war.

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.

The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.

No American worth his salt should go around looking for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.

Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth ... What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

As a result of the feminist revolution, 'feminine' becomes an abusive epithet.

One night Death left his card. I was not familiar with the name he chose: but the black edge was deep. I flung it back. A thousand awakenings of violence.

The puritanical potentialities of science have never been forecast. If it evolves a body of organized rites, and is established as a religion, hierarchically organized, things more than anything else will be done in the name of 'decency.' The coarse fumes of tobacco and liquors, the consequent tainting of the breath and staining of white fingers and teeth, which is so offensive to many women, will be the first things attended to.

Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.