Percy Wyndham Lewis was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited BLAST, the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include Tarr and The Human Age trilogy, composed of The Childermass, Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta.
Wyndham Lewis Quotes
1. “Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.”
— Wyndham Lewis
2. “Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.”
— Wyndham Lewis
3. “The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”
— Wyndham Lewis
4. “Art is the expression of an enormous preference.”
— Wyndham Lewis
5. “What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?”
— Wyndham Lewis
6. “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
7. “An artist should be as impartial as God.”
— Wyndham Lewis
8. “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
9. “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
10. “Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.”
— Wyndham Lewis
11. “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
12. “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
13. “Where there is abundance you can afford waste.”
— Wyndham Lewis
14. “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.”
— Wyndham Lewis
15. “Life is art’s rival and vice versa.”
— Wyndham Lewis
16. “To give up another person’s love is a mild suicide; like a very bad inoculation as compared to the full disease.”
— Wyndham Lewis
17. “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
18. “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
19. “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
20. “Satire has a great big glaring target. If successful, it blasts a great big hole in the center. Directness there must be and singleness of aim: it is all aim, all trajectory.”
— Wyndham Lewis
21. “Lenin in a top hat and frock coat would be a far greater anomaly than the Grand Lama of Thibet or a Zulu chief in that costume.”
— Wyndham Lewis
22. “Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”
— Wyndham Lewis
23. “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
24. “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.”
— Wyndham Lewis
25. “No American worth his salt should go around looking for a root. I advance this in all modesty, as a not unreasonable opinion.”
— Wyndham Lewis
26. “People are so overwhelmed with the prestige of their instruments that they consider their personal judgement of hardly any account.”
— Wyndham Lewis
27. “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.”
— Wyndham Lewis
28. “Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine.”
— Wyndham Lewis
29. “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
30. “Surely to root politics out of art is a highly necessary undertaking: for the freedom of art, like that of science, depends entirely upon its objectivity and non-practical, non-partisan passion.”
— Wyndham Lewis
31. “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
32. “Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.”
— Wyndham Lewis
33. “Laughter is the representative of Tragedy, when Tragedy is away.”
— Wyndham Lewis
34. “The streets of a modern city are depressing. They are so aimless and so weak in their lines and their masses, that the mind and senses jog on their way like passengers in a train with blinds down in an overcrowded carriage.”
— Wyndham Lewis
35. “Men were only made into ‘men’ with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally ‘a man’ any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.”
— Wyndham Lewis
36. “It is more comfortable for me, in the long run, to be rude than polite…”
— Wyndham Lewis
37. “People ought to be allowed to drop to pieces in any way they choose. I even disapprove of propping them up. Let nations, like men, die in peace. I rather feel as if I had been delivering pep talks to men dying of cancer.”
— Wyndham Lewis
38. “The ideal of perfect Success is an ideal belonging to the same sort of individual as the inventor of Equal Rights of man and Perfectibility.”
— Wyndham Lewis
39. “All orthodox opinion – that is, today, “revolutionary” opinion either of the pure or the impure variety – is anti-man.”
— Wyndham Lewis
40. “The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.”
— Wyndham Lewis
41. “Then down came the lid – the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a “war to end war.” But it merely ended art. It did not end war.”
— Wyndham Lewis
42. “As a result of the feminist revolution, feminine becomes an abusive epithet.”
— Wyndham Lewis
43. “For the first rate poet, nothing short of a Queen or a Chimera is adequate for the powers of his praise.”
— Wyndham Lewis
44. “I am an artist, and, through my eye, must confess to a tremendous bias. In my purely literary voyages my eye is always my compass.”
— Wyndham Lewis
45. “Laughter is the Wild Body’s song of triumph.”
— Wyndham Lewis
46. “Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.”
— Wyndham Lewis
47. “Instead of the vast organization to exploit the weakness of the Many, should we not possess one for the exploitation of the intelligence of the Few?”
— Wyndham Lewis
48. “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.”
— Wyndham Lewis
49. “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
50. “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.”
— Wyndham Lewis
51. “The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: he is the mind imagining, not the executant.”
— Wyndham Lewis
52. “One night Death left his card. I was not familiar with the name he chose: but the black edge was deep. I flung it back. A thousand awakenings of violence.”
— Wyndham Lewis
53. “Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.”
— Wyndham Lewis
54. “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.”
— Wyndham Lewis
55. “A sort of war of revenge on the intellect is what, for some reason, thrives in the contemporary social atmosphere.”
— Wyndham Lewis
56. “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
57. “Happiness is the chief material also in the construction of Utopias.”
— Wyndham Lewis
58. “Artists put as much vitality and delight into their saintliness and escape out as most men do their escapes into similar places from respectable existence.”
— Wyndham Lewis
59. “We are against the glorification of “the People,” as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren.”
— Wyndham Lewis
60. “A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them.”
— Wyndham Lewis
61. “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.”
— Wyndham Lewis
62. “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
63. “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
64. “And to wish to be alone, or to drink alone, or to do anything else alone, is the first step to the supernatural: which, in its turn, is the first step to the stake or the crucifix.”
— Wyndham Lewis
65. “Death is the thing that differentiates art and life. Art is identical with the idea of permanence. It is a continuity and not an individual spasm. Life is the idea of the person.”
— Wyndham Lewis
66. “Love performs its natural miracle, and they become part of us; it is a dismemberment to cast them off. Our own blood flows out after them when they go.”
— Wyndham Lewis
