Top 38 John Cowper 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The more money you give to people the better; and the less advice.
John Cowper Powys
#6. 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
#7. I love to cook; I cook every day. Chicken features a lot in our lives.
Kate Winslet
#8. 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
#9. At home, when the heating pipes made noises, I imagined a tiny person was in there skipping with a rope. The fantasy world of tiny things became my escape.
Willard Wigan
#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. 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
#12. It is by a process of simplification carried constantly further and further that happiness is won.
John Cowper Powys
#14. Let none count themselves wise who have not with the nerves of their imagination felt the pain of the vivisected.
John Cowper Powys
#15. 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
#16. The permanent mental attitude which the sensitive intelligence derives from philosophy is an attitude that combines extreme reverence with limitless skepticism.
John Cowper Powys
#17. 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
#18. Don't let your phone calls, online chats, and other trivial activities manage you. You have to manage them because they don't have the dreams to fulfill; you have the dreams.
Israelmore Ayivor
#19. A life isn't significant except for its impact on other lives.
Jackie Robinson
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. The end product of the successful preacher's input is transformation.
Christian Michael
#26. This was my world: cold, tangled and distorted. -Keira
S.L. Wallace
#27. 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
#28. We are in a waking dream ... We see worlds where others scheme ...
Hamza Yusuf
#29. It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.
Muriel Spark
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. She's erasing me bit by bit and it's painfully obvious that no one can stop her.
J.M. Northup
#34. The love that interferes and knows not how to leave alone is a love alien to Nature's ways.
John Cowper Powys
#35. 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
#37. My portrayal of Fagin was all to do with my experience in comedy and revue.
Ron Moody
#38. 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
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