Wyndham Lewis Quotes - Page 3

To begin with, I hold that there is never an end; everything of which our life is composed, pictures and books as much as anything else, is a means only, in the sense that the work of art exists in the body of the movement of life. It may be a strong factor of progress and direction, but we cannot say that it is the end or reason of things, for it is so much implicated with them ; and when we are speaking of art we suddenly find that we are talking of life all the time.

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.

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.

People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.

Spain is an overflow of sombreness . . . a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.

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.

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.

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.

Where there is abundance you can afford waste.

No American worth his salt should go looking around for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

With most people, not describable as artists, all the finer part of their vitality goes into sex. They become third-rate poets during their courtship. All their instincts of drama come out freshly with their wives. The artist is he in whom this emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is the Artist himself, a new sort of person; the creative man.

It is more comfortable for me, in the long run, to be rude than polite.

Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.

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

To give up another person's love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease.

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.

For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.

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.

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.