Wyndham Lewis Quotes - Page 2

Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.

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.

Dying for an idea,' again, sounds well enough, but why not let the idea die instead of you?

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.

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.

The teacher does not have to be, although he has to know: he is the mind imagining, not the executant.

Revolution today is taken for granted, and in consequence becomes rather dull.

Laughter is the Wild Body's song of triumph.

Life is art's rival and vice versa.

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.

Revolutionary politics, revolutionary art, and oh, the revolutionary mind, is the dullest thing on earth... What a stupid word! What a stale fuss!

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?

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.

Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness.

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.

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

A man only goes and confesses his faults to the world when his self will not acknowledge or listen to them.

The puritanical 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.

The English certainly and fiercely pride themselves in never praising themselves.

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.

If an art has for its function to represent manners and people, I do not see how it can avoid systematizing its sensibility to the extent of showing some figures much as Molière, for instance, did, as absurd or detestable.

Sex is of the same clay as Time! -- of the same clay Since both are in their essence but One-Way Time is the one-way dimension: sex its tart And subtle biological counterpart.

Then we are assured by Sartre that owing to the final disappearance of God our liberty is absolute! At this the entire audience waves its hat or claps its hands. But this natural enthusiasm is turned abruptly into something much less buoyant when it is learnt that this liberty weighs us down immediately with tremendous responsibilities. We now have to take all God's worries on our shoulders -now that we are become men like gods. It is at this point that the Anxiety and Despondency begin, ending in utter despair.

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.

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.