Percy Wyndham Lewis Quotes

...a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting buns--especially when the ladies were present. [on fellow Brit Ford Madox Ford] ~ Percy Wyndham Lewis

I do not think I have ever seen a nastier-looking man ... Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, the eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist. [on Brit poet Percy Wyndham Lewis] ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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

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

I'm happy for you Agastya,you're leaving for a more meaningful context. This place is like a parody, a complete farce, they're trying to build another Cambridge here. At my old University I used to teach Macbeth to my MA English classes in Hindi.English in India is burlesque. But now you'll get out of here to somehow a more real situation. In my time I'd wanted to give this Civil Service exam too, I should have. Now I spend my time writing papers for obscure journals on L. H. Myers and Wyndham Lewis, and teaching Conrad to a bunch of half-wits. ~ Upamanyu Chatterjee

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

Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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

Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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

Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias. ~ Wyndham Lewis

Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly. ~ Wyndham Lewis

Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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! ~ 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

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

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

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine. ~ 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

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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

The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising
themselves. ~ Wyndham Lewis

The first phase of modernism, which so far as the English language goes we associate with Pound and Yeats, Wyndham Lewis and Eliot and Joyce, was clerkly enough, sceptical in many ways; and yet we can without difficulty convict most of these authors of dangerous lapses into mythical thinking. All were men of critical temper, haters of the decadence of the times and the myths of mauvaise foi. All, in different ways, venerated tradition and had programmes which were at once modern and anti-schismatic. This critical temper was admittedly made to seem consistent with a strong feeling for renovation; the mood was eschatological, but scepticism and a refined traditionalism held in check what threatened to be a bad case of literary primitivism. It was elsewhere that the myths ran riot. ~ Frank Kermode

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

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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. ~ 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

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

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them. WYNDHAM LEWIS, Tarr Two persons will not be friends long if they are not inclined to pardon each other's little failings. ~ Jean De La Bruyere

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

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. ~ Wyndham Lewis

Personally I feel for the fans because I remember the period of time when Michael Schumacher was winning. I remember waking up in the morning to watch the start of the race and then going to sleep, and then waking up when it ended because I already knew what would happen. I am pretty sure a lot of people were doing that today ~ Lewis Hamilton

Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. ~ C.S. Lewis