Top 64 Wyndham Lewis Quotes
#1. Art is the expression of an enormous preference.
Wyndham Lewis
#2. 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
#3. The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: he is the mind imagining, not the executant.
Wyndham Lewis
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising
themselves.
Wyndham Lewis
#9. Lenin in a top hat and frock coat would be a far greater anomaly than the Grand Lama of Thibet or a Zulu chief in that costume.
Wyndham Lewis
#10. Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.
Wyndham Lewis
#11. Men were only made into 'men' with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally 'a man' any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.
Wyndham Lewis
#12. 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
#13. People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.
Wyndham Lewis
#14. 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
#15. Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.
Wyndham Lewis
#16. Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
Wyndham Lewis
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. As a result of the feminist revolution, 'feminine' becomes an abusive epithet.
Wyndham Lewis
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.
Wyndham Lewis
#25. Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding ... Cut it at any point, it is the same thing ... all fat, without nerve.
Wyndham Lewis
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. (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
#29. Dying for an idea,' again, sounds well enough, but why not let the idea die instead of you?
Wyndham Lewis
#31. Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.
Wyndham Lewis
#32. Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
Wyndham Lewis
#33. God is, of course, a terrifying reality. I had thought that I knew all about God, and had Him in a pigeon hole. But I met Him at the corner of a street
He entered my mind with a bang, and nearly burst my head open.
Wyndham Lewis
#35. 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
#36. All orthodox opinion - that is, today, "revolutionary" opinion either of the pure or the impure variety - is anti-man.
Wyndham Lewis
#37. Almost anything that can be praised or advocated has been put to some disgusting use. There is no principle, however immaculate, that has not had its compromising manipulator.
Wyndham Lewis
#38. Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.
Wyndham Lewis
#39. 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
#40. Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.
Wyndham Lewis
#41. 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
#42. Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.
Wyndham Lewis
#43. We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a "great age" that has not "come off". We moved too quickly for the world. We set too sharp a pace.
Wyndham Lewis
#44. Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
Wyndham Lewis
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine.
Wyndham Lewis
#49. It is more comfortable for me, in the long run, to be rude than polite.
Wyndham Lewis
#50. 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
#51. To give up another person's love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease.
Wyndham Lewis
#52. 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
#53. What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?
Wyndham Lewis
#55. Where there is abundance you can afford waste.
Wyndham Lewis
#56. Lewis sought no disciples, nor does he offer a program or solution, rather his contribution is a critical discipline. Lewis is a stimulant, a mode of perception, rather than a position or practice.
Wyndham Lewis
#57. In the democratic western countries so-called capitalism leads a saturnalia of 'freedom', like a bastard brother of reform.
Wyndham Lewis
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.
Wyndham Lewis
#64. Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.
Wyndham Lewis
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
