Wyndham Lewis Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  Writing, Artist, Persons

  49 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Zoos, Sharks

  Wyndham Lewis (1967). “Blasting & Bombardiering”, p.12, Univ of California Press

  18 Copy quote

• Contradict yourself. In order to live, you must remain broken up.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Order, Broken, Broken Up

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

  14 Copy quote

• An artist should be as impartial as God.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Artist, Should

  14 Copy quote

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

  Wyndham Lewis

  Revenge, War, Intelligent

  Wyndham Lewis (1926). “The Art of Being Ruled”

  13 Copy quote

• With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping homeliness entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all sentiment is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called the Public, the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Family, Baby, Sweet

  Wyndham Lewis (1926). “The Art of Being Ruled”

  17 Copy quote

• (Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Cities, Canada, Portraits

  18 Copy quote

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

  Wyndham Lewis

  Laughter, Self, Tragedy

  "Inferior Religions" by Wyndham Lewis, 1917.

  8 Copy quote

• Wherever there is objective truth, there is satire.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Objective Truth, Satire, Objectives

  Wyndham Lewis (1950). “Rude Assignment: A Narrative of My Career Up-to-date”

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Males, Gender

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Garden, Eden

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

  31 Copy quote

• Revolution has become a sort of violent and hollow routine.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Routine, Revolution, Violent

  Wyndham Lewis (1929). “The Diabolical Principle and The Dithyrambic Spectator”, p.37, Ardent Media

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Taken, Men, House

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Reality, Mind, Bangs

  Wyndham Lewis (1956). “The Red Priest”, London, Methuen

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Italian, Oil

  Wyndham Lewis, Scott W. Klein (2010). “Tarr”, p.7, Oxford University Press

  10 Copy quote

• As a result of the feminist revolution, feminine becomes an abusive epithet.

  Wyndham Lewis

  Feminist, Feminism, Revolution

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Air, Village, Earth

  America and Cosmic Man ch. 2 (1948)

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Thinking, Sight

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Depressing, Cities, Mind

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Religious, Mean, Science

  1926 The Art of Being Ruled.

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Animal, Political

  Wyndham Lewis, David Peters Corbett (1994). “The Enemy: A Review of Art and Literature”, p.183, Taylor & Francis

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Use, Advertising

  Wyndham Lewis (1969). “Wyndham Lewis: an anthology of his prose”

  63 Copy quote

• 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

  Gun, Austerity, Path

  Wyndham Lewis (1989). “The Essential Wyndham Lewis: An Introduction to His Work”, Andre Deutsch Limited

  60 Copy quote

• 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

  Powerful, Equality, Suffering

  Wyndham Lewis (1969). “Wyndham Lewis: an anthology of his prose”

  14 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Stupid, Mind

  6 Copy quote

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