Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Wyndham Lewis
Wyndham Lewis Quotes
59 Sourced Quotes
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.
Wyndham Lewis
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.
Wyndham Lewis
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Laughter is the sudden handshake of mystic violence and the anarchist.
Wyndham Lewis
Source
Report...
Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.
Wyndham Lewis
Source
Report...
Laughter does not progress. It is primitive, hard and unchangeable.
Wyndham Lewis
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Laughter is the strong elastic fish, caught in Styx, springing and flapping about until it dies.
Wyndham Lewis
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Dying for an idea,' again, sounds well enough, but why not let the idea die instead of you?
Wyndham Lewis
Source
Report...
Laughter is the one obvious commotion that is not complex, or in expression dynamic.
Wyndham Lewis
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
1
2
3
Quote of the day
Destiny is the invention of the cowardly, and the resigned.
Ignazio Silone
Wyndham Lewis
Creative Commons
Born:
November 18, 1882
Died:
March 7, 1957
(aged 74)
Bio:
Percy Wyndham Lewis was an English painter and author. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art, and edited the literary magazine of the Vorticists, BLAST.
Known for:
The Apes of God (1930)
Blasting and Bombardiering (1937)
Self condemned (1954)
The revenge for love (1937)
Most used words:
laughter
revolutionary
tragedy
man
today
Wyndham Lewis on Wikipedia
Suggest an edit or a new quote
Wyndham Lewis Quotes
Wyndham Lewis Short Quotes
British Painter Quotes
Painter Quotes
19th-century Painter Quotes
Related People
Ezra Pound
American Critic
David Bomberg
British Painter
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes