Top 42 John Cowper Powys Quotes
#1. [on John Cowper Powys] ... there is an indistinct photograph of the great man himself, gazing into the misty cleft of a mountain range, wearing what could be an old rug, or an old cardigan. He looks like a cross between an aged werewolf and a puzzled child.
Margaret Drabble
#2. We have at any rate one advantage over Time and Space. We think them whereas it is extremely doubtful whether they think us!
John Cowper Powys
#4. No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education.
John Cowper Powys
#5. When I get that feeling, I want some sexual healing.
Marvin Gaye
#6. We'll teach it that the humblest insect measuring out its miserable days by the pug-wuggery and skull duggery of the old Slug of Time is worth far more than this defecating bubble!
John Cowper Powys
#7. The more money you give to people the better; and the less advice.
John Cowper Powys
#8. This is the whole secret of the practice of Elementalism: it obtains happiness by the most rigid and austere simplification of the means to happiness.
John Cowper Powys
#9. Most of the pathetic scenes in almost everybody's life are scenes unnoted by anyone and totally disregarded by the person in question.
John Cowper Powys
#10. Man is the animal who weeps and laughs - and writes. If the first Prometheus brought fire from heaven in a fennel-stalk, the last will take it back - in a book.
John Cowper Powys
#11. What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it's a science. It's neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.
Ben Kingsley
#12. If by the time we're sixty we haven't learned what a knot of paradox and contradiction life is, and how exquisitely the good and the bad are mingled in every action we take, and what a compromising hostess Our Lady of Truth is, we haven't grown old to much purpose.
John Cowper Powys
#13. Treason is a strong word, but not too strong to characterize the situation in which the Senate is the eager, resourceful, and indefatigable agent of interests as hostile to the American people as any invading army could be.
David Graham Phillips
#14. It is by a process of simplification carried constantly further and further that happiness is won.
John Cowper Powys
#15. It is amazing how the world can change, he thought, during the life span of a fruitcake.
Robert M. Edsel
#17. Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected.
John Cowper Powys
#18. Having once aroused in our mind enough faith in our own will-power to create a universe of contemplation and forget everything else, there are few limitations to the happiness we may enjoy.
John Cowper Powys
#19. The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism.
John Cowper Powys
#20. Who has not watched a mother stroke her child's cheek or kiss her child in a certain way and felt a nervous shudder at the possessive outrage done to a free solitary human soul?
John Cowper Powys
#21. Shop for security over happiness and we buy it at that price.
Richard Bach
#24. What would ever become of Tilly-Valley's religion in that world, with headlights flashing along cemented highways, and all existence dominated by electricity? What would become of old women reading by candlelight? What would become of his own life-illusion, his secret 'mythology,' in such a world?
John Cowper Powys
#25. Our rulers at the present day, with their machines and their preachers, are all occupied in putting into our heads the preposterous notion that activity rather than contemplation is the object of life.
John Cowper Powys
#27. American influence in the world is certainly considerable, but the United States does not control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies, as empires have always done, save for a few special cases that turn out to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
Michael Mandelbaum
#28. We dance to reclaim our brilliant ability to disappear in something bigger, something safe, a space without a critic or a judge or an analyst.
Gabrielle Roth
#29. Faith without action is delusion. Faith does not wait for miracles but produces them. If you think you can or if you think you can't, you are right.
Henry Ford
#31. It is that cricket field that, in all the sharp and bitter moments of life as they come to me now, gives me a sense of wholesome proportion: 'At least I am not playing cricket!
John Cowper Powys
#32. When the matriarch is gone, so is the herd's collective memory.
Jodi Picoult
#33. The first time onstage, a light went on. 'OK, this is my thing. I'm comfortable here. This is my thing.'
Wanda Sykes
#34. The meaning of culture is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.
John Cowper Powys
#36. The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways.
John Cowper Powys
#37. A bookshop is powder-magazine, a dynamite-shed, a drugstore of poisons, a bar of intoxicants, a den of opiates, an island of sirens.
John Cowper Powys
#39. It will never stop, Danny thought. The Overlook burned and the most terrible of its revenants went into the lockboxes, but I can't lock away the shining, because it isn't just inside me, it is me. Without booze to at least stun it, these visions will go on until they drive me insane.
Stephen King
#40. The mistake we make is to turn upon our past with angry wholesale negation. ... The way of wisdom is to treat it airily, lightly, wantonly, and in a spirit of poetry; and above all to use its symbols, which are its spiritual essence, giving them a new connotation, a fresh meaning.
John Cowper Powys
#41. Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.
John Cowper Powys
#42. Love may start out as a good feeling, but to love someone long-term is an act of the will.
Elizabeth George
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