Wyndham Lewis > Quotes

“Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“What is the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?”
― Wyndham Lewis, Letters

“Many great writers address audiences who do not exist; to address passionately and sometimes with very great wisdom people who do not exist has this advantage—that there will always be a group of people who, seeing a man shouting apparently at somebody or other, and seeing nobody else in sight, will think it is they who are being addressed.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“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, The Art of Being Ruled

“Art is the expression of an enormous preference.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.”
― Wyndham Lewis

“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

“The War went on far too long... It was too vast for its meaning, like a giant with the brain of a midge. Its epic proportions were grotesquely out of scale, seeing what it was fought to settle. It was far too indecisive. It settled nothing, as it meant nothing. Indeed, it was impossible to escape the feeling that it was not meant to settle anything - that could have any meaning, or be of any advantage, to the general run of men.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering

“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

“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, The Art of Being Ruled

“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, Blast #1

“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

“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, Doom of youth

“An uncomfortable thing happened now. He realised suddenly all the possibilities of this chance acquaintanceship, plainly and cinematographically. He was seized with panic. He must make a good impression. From that moment he ran the risk of doing the reverse. For he was unaccustomed to act with calculation. There he was like some individual who had gone nonchalantly into the presence of a prince; who—just in the middle of the audience—when he would have been getting over his first embarrassment —is overcome with a tardy confusion, the imagination in some way giving a jump. It is the imagination, repressed and as it were slighted, revenging itself. Casting about desperately for means of handling the situation, he remembered she had spoken of getting a dog to guide her. What had she meant? Anyway, he grasped at the dog. He could regain possession of himself in romantic stimulus of this figure. He would be her dog! Lie at her feet! He would fill with a merely animal warmth and vivacity the void that must exist in her spirit. His imagination, flattered, came in as ally. This, too, exempted him from the necessity of being victorious. All he asked was to be her dog! Only wished to impress her as a dog! Even if she did not feel much sympathy for him now, no matter. He would humbly follow her up, put himself at her disposition, not be exigent. It was a role difficult to refuse him. Sense of security the humility of this resolution brought about, caused him to regain a self-possession. Only it imposed the condition, naturally, of remaining a dog.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“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

“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

“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

“Deadness, in the limited sense in which we use that word, is the first condition of art. The second is absence of soul, in the sentimental human sense. The lines and masses of the statue are its soul. No restless, quick flame-like ego is imagined for the inside of it. It has no inside. This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see. Instead, then, of being something impelled like an independent machine by a little egoistic fire inside, it lives soullessly and deadly by its frontal lines and masses.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“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, Tarr

“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, The Lion and the Fox

“...a flabby lemon and pink giant, who hung his mouth open as though he were an animal at the zoo inviting buns--especially when the ladies were present. [on fellow Brit Ford Madox Ford]”
― Percy Wyndham Lewis

“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, Tarr

“Being born in a stable does not make you a horse. But living in a studio produces in some persons a feeling that they should dabble and daub a little.”
― Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God

“You my live by words - you may live fatly by the word of your mouth, you may even enslave historic nations by the spoken word. But there are times when the words will fail you whoever you are, all the same.”
― Wyndham Lewis, The Roaring Queen

“That is enough—the blood is gratis ! Both the soldier and the communist enrol themselves to murder—one under militarist rules, the other under marxist disciplines. But both are homicide-clubs, you call your victim ‘ Hun,’ you call him ‘ Bourgeois,’ it is all one—no, wars and communes have cheapened murder.”
― Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God

“Morality is of the surface. But also the values that decide whether a person is ridiculous or free from absurdity are pure conventions of a society, they exist only in a surface-world, of two dimensions.”
― Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God

“Yet it is true that in our democratic society flattery does take the form of saying to people that they are like other people—rather than unlike or possessing something peculiarly their own. And the personal advantages that are chosen to flatter them about are those that they share with great crowds of other people.”
― Wyndham Lewis, The Apes of God

“This is another condition of art; to have no inside, nothing you cannot see.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Tarr

“It is quite useless speculating on the Future, unless you want some particular Future. Then you obviously should speculate, and it is by speculations (of all sorts, unfortunately) that the Future is made. The Future, like the Truth, is composed of genial words.”
― Wyndham Lewis, Blast 2

“All Shakespeare’s work can be regarded as a criticism of action and of the agent-principle: though it is only in Hamlet that this mood becomes explicit, and as it were personal. This incomparable observer of the life around him “had his opinions” of what he saw, although he had no gesture of rebellion against individual phases of it, but innumerable gestures against life itself. And, if against life itself, then against action itself. It was the universality or impersonal all-inclusiveness of this rebellion that makes him a “universal” artist, as he is often called.”
― Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox