Wyndham Lewis Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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
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. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.

Wyndham Lewis
A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.

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

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
Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist.

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

Wyndham Lewis
Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable.

Wyndham Lewis
The puritanic 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
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
Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies.

Wyndham Lewis
But 'art' is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger's Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

Wyndham Lewis
The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.

Wyndham Lewis
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.
Of Three Lives (1909)

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

Wyndham Lewis
Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic.

Wyndham Lewis
You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the Machine; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism.

Wyndham Lewis
When we say 'science' we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science, the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.

Wyndham Lewis
Laughter is the bark of delight of a gregarious animal at the proximity of its kind.

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

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
Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth. When we open a revolutionary review, or read a revolutionary speech, we yawn our heads off. It is true, there is nothing else. Everything is correctly, monotonously, dishearteningly revolutionary. What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

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
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
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
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
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